We all have a picture of the world, an idea of what is real, inside which we live. Sudden disaster–the death of a loved one, the loss of a vital job, a murder, a meltdown at a nearby nuclear reactor–breaks that picture and we have to try to reconstruct it, or something like it, or something completely different.

Salman Rushdie, “A Sundering,” in Suleika Jaouad, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life (2025), 271.