I started this book solely because of a review online mentioning grief, loss, and love. It's October, life is hard, I'm in a deep state of melancholy. Seemed like a perfect fit.

2 days later and I can't help but feel like I experienced the totality of what Kathryn highlights as the meaning of finding in it's most magical form: "in moments like that, whether you believed god has blessed you, that fate has smiled on you, or simply that in a stochastic world, very unlikely odds have broken in your favor... A pocket of the universe turns inside out and you feel the presence of some force outside of yourself... Amazement, gratitude, wonder, awe: the feelings inspired in us by serendipitous finds are the same ones inspired in us by the cosmos as a whole, and for the same reason--- because life gave us something that we did not expect, did not as for, and did not in any particular way deserve."

This ended up being nothing like the book I was initially searching for in my head, but it was everything I could have asked for and so much more. I'll spoil the ending of this review, this is easily my new favorite book of all time. I'll probably reread this annually and more intently with fresh eyes as I grow older and experience more losing and finding in life. I've never been moved to tears over writing so pure, profound, and radiant.

I've been fortunate so far in my life yet to feel deep profound grief, and unlucky enough to yet to feel the amazement of truly falling in love: incipit vita nova. Despite not being able to relate to both of the major elements of this book, I found myself consistently choked up at both the prospects of both one day knowing grief and love as intimately as Kathryn beautifully writes.

That experience of being choked up is hard to describe aside as simply experiencing an existential feeling. What the Portuguese call suadade, Kathryn writes "It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting."

Whether it's grief as a feeling of unexpressed love or love as the experience of immediate infinite finding I felt a natural urge to deflect or keep myself from engaging with those ideas directly, but that would be a disservice to the whole point of the book. Falling in love with the world is accepting that it will crack you open. Our lives are literally everything to us, but really the scope of everything we can ever experience is so limited. How lucky are we to feel what there is to feel while we're here.