This morning I heard a minute of The Writer’s Almanac as I turned into the parking garage at Vienna Metro. It’s the birthday of Soren Kierkegaard, said Garrison Keillor in his mellifluous voice. Kierkegaard, the philosopher who gave us the leap of faith — “that faith is not possible without doubt. That one must doubt the existence of God to have faith in the existence of God.”

Thinking of the basement study room in my freshman dorm where I wrestled with Kierkegaard and (I think it’s safe to say) Kierkegaard won. Realizing then that philosophy was not just admiring big ideas, it was grappling with them, plumbing them, going deeper and deeper into their caverns until I wasn’t sure I could claw my way out.

But those same ideas are how we live our lives. The leap of faith, for instance. How difficult to summon it — yet how utterly imperative.