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TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from MARCH—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

In 1969, a young a researcher trained in both medical biophysics and psychology named Peter Levine sat across from a woman he would call Nancy in everything he'd write afterward (a small courtesy, protecting her name while keeping her story intact.)

Nancy had come to him with an impossible catalogue of symptoms (Oh, Nancy. How I relate): fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, migraines, panic attacks, and agoraphobia so severe she couldn't leave the house without her husband. Levine had been doing modest, careful work teaching people to relax the muscles in their jaw and neck, watching blood pressure drop twenty points. He began a session with Nancy the way he began all sessions; he had her lie on her back.

It went wrong almost immediately.

Nancy's heart rate began to climb. Then, without warning, it plummeted. She turned white, stared at him, and said: "I'm dying. Doctor, don't let me die." Levine had no protocol for this. There was no roadmap for moments that went this wrong.

What happened next he has described in lectures and books for fifty years, and it still sounds brilliantly unhinged. Levine suddenly had an unconscious image: a vision of a tiger crouching on the other side of the room getting ready to pounce. So he said something a therapist almost certainly should not say. He said: "Nancy, you're being chased by a tiger. Run! Run for the nearest tree!"

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There is a specific quality to the light in March when we spring forward, around 7pm, when it comes through west-facing windows and turns everything a particular cushiony pink. You probably have a feeling you associate with it; a specific interior texture that arrives with that light and doesn’t arrive in the same way any other time.

For me, it falls somewhere between the sand dunes of melancholy and the hopeful lift underneath a bird in fresh flight.

Throughout the year, nature’s flares call up various internal sensations. The first fall breeze as it lifts the hair from your arms, the smell of wood burning in winter, the vaguely metallic scent of first snow; all separate tones plucked from the same string.

We nod to these swells inside us, recognizing the expression of the outside world inside our bodies, the link between seasons and their companion feeling-tones. But what is this quality of the feeling itself called? How to name the what-it’s-like-ness inside our particular nervous system?

There is a particular comfort in discovering that other cultures have already solved problems we've barely acknowledged.

In Japan especially, there are rituals and ceremonies for the very life passages Americans tend to ignore or dismiss. We don't like discomfort. And rather than bearing down on it, living through pain in order to grow, we avoid it, hoping it will resolve on its own, only to find, often far too late, that it compounds.

Americans have mastered the art of celebrating society-sanctioned occasions: pregnancy, marriage, home ownership, birth. These transitions feel manageable. They’re bright, positive, fun, largely because we have scripts for them. We know what to say. We show up with gifts and cards.

For the ones where words fail us—not so much.

Below are seven rituals and ceremonies from around the world that caught my attention.

In 1973, when Jonathan Rosen was ten years old, his family moved to New Rochelle, New York. The son of intellectuals — a novelist mother whose best friend was Cynthia Ozick, and a professor father who escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport as a child — Jonathan was raised with Jewish ideals valuing intellectual excellence.

Named after his grandfather, who was murdered in the Holocaust, Rosen wore an anxious sadness, but was sustained by the belief that he could do great things.

Another 10-year-old boy, also from a family of Jewish intellectuals, lived down the street. Michael Laudor was charismatic and funny, with a penchant for reading multiple books at once, whose material he retained with his photographic memory. He dazzled adults and peers alike with his effortless aptitude, detailed knowledge of political players, and preternatural confidence—by all accounts, he was a boy genius.

Rosen and Laudor's symbiotic intellectual curiosity sparked an intense friendship. Their conversations were fueled by big ideas and grand visions, bonding them instantly, setting them on parallel paths which found them at the same sleep-away camp, the same prestigious summer program, sharing dreams of becoming writers, and vying for the same positions and accolades, easily meeting the expectations for greatness they’d grown up with, until their lives suddenly and dramatically diverged in ways no one saw coming.  

Until next week, I will remain,