Mark: Alright Michelle, five-word review for today's book. Michelle: Hope is a muscle, not a feeling. Mark: Ooh, I like that. Mine is: Your breakdown is your breakthrough. Michelle: Okay, I'm intrigued. This sounds less like typical self-help and more like... self-artistry. Mark: That's the perfect word for it. Today we are diving into Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by the award-winning poet Maggie Smith. And the artistry you're sensing comes from its origin. Michelle: How so? Mark: What's incredible is that this book started as a series of daily notes-to-self she posted on Twitter while going through a very public and painful divorce. It wasn't written from a mountaintop of wisdom; it was written from the bottom of a well, climbing out one day at a time. Michelle: Wow, so it's wisdom forged in real-time fire, not in comfortable hindsight. That changes everything. It’s not advice, it’s a survival log. Mark: Exactly. And that's why it resonated so deeply with people. It became a national bestseller because it felt so honest. It’s not about pretending the pain isn’t there. It’s about what you do with it. Michelle: That makes sense. The title "Keep Moving" can sound a bit like "just get over it," but this context suggests something much deeper. It’s not about moving past the pain, but moving with it. Mark: Precisely. And that brings us to the first big idea in the book, which is this concept of revision.

Michelle: Okay, "revision" sounds a bit like an English paper. What does she mean by revising your life? Is this just a poetic way of saying 'think positive'? Mark: It's more nuanced than that. As a writer, Smith loves the process of revision—of taking something messy and refining it. She applies that same logic to life. After a major upheaval like a divorce, your life story has been violently edited. You have to start revising. But here's the crucial warning she gives, and it's one of my favorite lines from the book. Michelle: Lay it on me. Mark: She writes, "If you’re not careful, you can revise the life right out of a piece of writing... As counterintuitive as it sounds, you can polish it dull. The same applies to our lives. If we’re not careful, we can revise the life right out of them. We can polish our lives dull." Michelle: Whoa. I love that. "Polish our lives dull." It's like those over-filtered Instagram photos, right? They’re technically perfect, but they have no character, no life in them. You’ve erased all the interesting shadows and textures. Mark: That's a perfect analogy. She's arguing against the kind of self-help that demands a flawless, perpetually happy narrative. She tells this beautiful story about it. She was talking with her eight-year-old daughter about revising life to guarantee a happy ending. Michelle: And what did the eight-year-old sage have to say? Mark: Her daughter just looked at her and said that knowing the ending of a story before it happens would be boring. Out of the mouths of babes. It was this profound insight that a life without uncertainty, without the potential for messiness, is a dull life. The goal isn't to create a perfect, predictable story. Michelle: That’s so freeing. It takes the pressure off. You don't have to pretend you have it all figured out. But I’m curious, how do you actually do that? How do you revise without over-polishing? What's the first step when your story has been blown apart? Mark: For her, a huge part of it was a shift in language. She talks about moving from telling her story in the first-person plural—"we"—to the first-person singular—"I." For years, her narrative was "we did this," "we want that." Suddenly, she had to learn to write a story for "I." Michelle: Oh, that's powerful. It's a grammatical shift that represents a seismic identity shift. You're no longer a co-author of a shared story. You're the sole author of a new one. Mark: And it's terrifying. The future she had planned, the one written in "we," was gone. The pages ahead were blank. So she started small. Each day, she would write a small goal for herself, a small note of encouragement. Things like, "Focus on who you are and what you’ve built, not who you’d planned on being." Michelle: It’s like she’s laying down one sentence at a time, building a new paragraph for her life. It’s not about writing a whole new book overnight. Mark: Exactly. And it's about accepting the weirdness and wildness of the new draft. She has this other great quote: "You are not broken. Your family is not broken. Your life is not broken—it’s changed shape and size." Michelle: I can see why people like Amanda Palmer and Bella Mackie said this book was a lifeline. It doesn't offer platitudes. It offers a new vocabulary for your pain. It’s not broken, it’s just… reshaped. Mark: And that acceptance of a new shape, of the messiness and the imperfections, leads directly to her next big idea: that the breakdown itself can be the most beautiful part of the story.

Michelle: Okay, finding beauty in a breakdown. That sounds good in a book, but on a Tuesday when everything is falling apart, it can feel impossible. How does she make that idea tangible? Mark: She starts with a concept she calls a "beauty emergency." Michelle: A beauty emergency? I'm picturing a SWAT team for aesthetics. What is that? Mark: It's a moment of such intense, fleeting beauty that you have to stop everything and pay attention. She tells a story about seeing this incredible magenta and aqua sunrise from her bathroom window one morning. She yelled for her kids, and her daughter came running, asking, "What's wrong?" And Smith replied, "Nothing’s wrong—just a beauty emergency. Look at that sky!" Michelle: I love that phrase! It reframes mindfulness from a chore, like 'I should meditate for 10 minutes,' into an urgent, joyful act. It’s not about discipline; it’s about response. You see beauty, you declare an emergency, you appreciate it. Mark: And then it's gone. The sky went back to normal. The emergency was over. But the practice of noticing it is the key. Because she then applies that same lens to something much darker. She talks about the period when her ex-husband moved out. It was late fall. Michelle: A season of decay. That’s some heavy-handed symbolism from the universe. Mark: Right? And as she was walking home alone after dropping her kids at school, she was looking at the fiery red and orange leaves. And she had this thought that became a mantra for her: "All this color came from decay." Michelle: Wow. That gives me chills. The most vibrant part of the leaf's life is its end. The beauty is a direct result of the breakdown. Mark: Exactly. The chlorophyll, the green, has to break down for those brilliant colors to be revealed. She's saying that maybe, just maybe, the most beautiful parts of our own stories are revealed only when the old structures decay. Michelle: So the "beauty emergency" of the sunrise is the training. You practice noticing the easy beauty so that you have the muscle to notice the difficult beauty—the beauty in the decay. Mark: You've got it. And this culminates in the most powerful metaphor in the book, one that she says inspired the whole project. It's the Japanese art of Kintsugi. Michelle: I think I've heard of this. It's repairing broken pottery, right? Mark: Yes, but with a crucial twist. The word translates to "golden joinery." When a ceramic bowl breaks, they don't glue it back together to hide the cracks. They mend it with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Michelle: So they highlight the cracks. They make the repair the most visible, most celebrated part of the object. Mark: Precisely. In the philosophy of Kintsugi, the object is more beautiful for having been broken. The history of its damage and repair is part of its story, and it's what makes it unique and strong. The brokenness isn't a flaw to be concealed; it's an event to be illuminated with gold. Michelle: That connects everything. Kintsugi is the physical manifestation of not "polishing your life dull." You're not trying to create a flawless, unbroken surface. You're taking the jagged edges of your story and making them the focal point. The repair becomes the art. Mark: And she has this quote that just ties it all together: "Accept that you may have to break on the way to wholeness... Think of it as a reassembling. You will not be the same, you will not be unscarred, but you will be better than before." The scars are the gold.

Michelle: So when you put it all together, the book is a roadmap for a very different kind of healing. Mark: It really is. It's not about bouncing back to who you were. That person is gone. The old ceramic bowl is shattered. The revision process isn't about trying to glue it back together perfectly. It's about the Kintsugi process. It's about reassembling the pieces into something new. Michelle: Something that acknowledges the breaks. The final product is a testament to its own resilience. It wears its history openly. Mark: And that's why the title is so perfect. "Keep Moving" isn't about running away from the past. It's about the slow, deliberate, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other process of reassembling yourself after the fire. It’s about picking up the pieces, finding the gold, and creating a new, stronger, more beautiful version of yourself. The goal isn't to get back to who you were, but to become someone new, someone stronger at the broken places. Michelle: It’s a profound shift in perspective. It makes you ask yourself: what 'crack' in my own life have I been trying to hide, that I could instead highlight with gold? What part of my story have I been trying to polish away, when it might actually be the most interesting part? Mark: That's the question the book leaves you with. It’s not about answers, but about giving you better questions to ask yourself. Michelle: And it encourages you to look for those little moments of light, those "beauty emergencies," even on the darkest days. That feels like a very practical, hopeful action anyone can take. Mark: Absolutely. It’s about cultivating hope as a practice. As she says, "Hope is imaginative: it allows you to envision what might be up ahead, even when you see nothing." Michelle: That’s a beautiful place to end. It makes me want to go find a beauty emergency right now. We’d love to hear what our listeners think about this. What’s a 'crack' in your life you're learning to see differently? Or what’s a 'beauty emergency' you’ve noticed this week? Find us on our socials and let us know. Your stories are part of this conversation. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.