August 12, 2026

The Power To Begin

Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.

Hannah Arendt wrote this in The Human Condition, published in 1958, in the shadow of a war and totalitarian movements that had tried to reduce human beings to interchangeable material for historical forces. She argued that alongside mortality, every person carries natality: the fact of having been born introduces something new into the world that never existed before. Action, in her view, is the uniquely human power to interrupt the drift toward decline with something unexpected. Before today's tasks and habits take over, this morning is itself a small exercise of that same power to begin.