The most recent issue of The Mockingbird ("The Surprise Issue") includes an interview with Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams and Make It Scream, Make It Burn. The topic here is grace, the grace we share with each other:
We can offer things—do offer things—to other people without any kind of pure heart: grudgingly, resentfully, with white knuckles or clenched guts, and it can still be deeply meaningful. It can still "count." Even that notion of "counting" is a delusion I've long subscribed to and am sort of interested in pushing back against, or playing tag with, or sitting down and having a cup of tea and a long chat with.... I'm trying to get away from frameworks of grace that rely on sufficiency, and to lean into notions of pleasant ambush, desire, and care—the primal ways we are moved to want, and to give, the ways that our not knowing or controlling our destinies ultimately gives those destinies more spacious horizons.