Category: Daily Blog

When you’re sick on Monday, it feels almost impossible to imagine that, by Sunday, you’ll be well enough to go on a five-hour train ride. Almost. In that “almost” lives the little bit of perceived probability you need to fill your seemingly unlikely vision with color.

Because of course, in reality, it is far from impossible to recover from a cold within a week. You’ve done it plenty of times. In fact, it is a more likely outcome than not improving at all — but right now, your bedridden brain just won’t allow you to see it.

Like many things, imagination is worth the most when it’s hardest to practice. Have faith, and continue to book tickets against the odds.

When you can speak only in a whisper, you’ll think twice as long about what you’ll say, if anything. My voice has been gone for a day, likely due to the flu, and I’m already adjusting my speaking habits.

It doesn’t take much for the simple things to be taken away, and it’s not your most prized possessions that must take a hit for you to deeply shift your perspective. Remove a man’s ability to eat what he wants, to hear, see, or feel things touching his skin, and he’ll adapt quickly and drastically, even if the change is only temporary.

What are you taking for granted that might not be granted to you tomorrow? And how would you adjust if that gift were truly gone for a week? What about a lifetime?

Seneca once said that “nothing ought to be unexpected by us.” We should “send our minds forward in advance to meet all problems, and we should consider not what is wont to happen, but what can happen.” Anticipate the unlikely but possible, and learn from it before you have to.

When the two Viking worshippers Ubbe and Floki finally reunite in a strange new land after being apart for years, Ubbe asks his old friend: “Are the gods here? Have you seen them?”

Having spent a lifetime trying to please Odin and co. without much result, Floki can only scoff: “Don’t bother me with that. What business is that of mine? I am an ant, toiling on the forest floor. I see only the leaf above my head. That leaf brings me some relief from the sun.”

Like Floki once used to, Ubbe thirsts for knowledge. But after seeing knowledge be of little use and even less permanence time and again, Floki reminds him of the only fact that matters: the present. “You don’t need to know anything,” he tells him. “It’s not important. Let the past go.”

How much time do we spend wondering: “What if I had done this differently? What motive lies behind that person’s actions? Why is what used to work no longer working?” In reality, none of it matters.

We are ants, toiling on the forest floor. When there’s a leaf above our heads, we walk into its shadow, and we enjoy some relief from the sun. And when there isn’t? Then we keep toiling away. Sooner or later, a new leaf will appear.

When you catch yourself spending too much time in your head, ask: “Do I really need to know?” Chances are, the answer is “No.” You just need to return to the present, pick up the next blade of grass, and be on your way.

The good thing about a crisis is that it inhabits so much of your mental space, you won’t have time to indulge some of your usual mistakes.

An urgent deadline with a last-minute reboot might get you so focused on work, you forget to eat here and there, leading to less snacking. An upcoming performance with high stakes might make you cut your drinking by 50%, seemingly without effort.

The real win, however, is maintaining your crisis benefits after the crisis has subsided. Can you emerge from a career disaster or financial setback not just with a better job or healthier bank account, but also as a more loving mother, fitter runner, or less frequent nail-biter? Of course you can!

Never waste a good crisis, they say. Why? Because in solving a dilemma, you may eliminate more problems than just the one staring you square in the face. Use the momentum, and rise stronger than ever before.

Have you ever told someone an anecdote from your past, perhaps about one of your youthful indiscretions, and then heard them say, “Really? You did that? I can hardly imagine!” Maybe, you even agreed with them. “Neither can I!”

If not for laughs, then at least thinking quietly to yourself, I’m sure you’ve experienced this. A memory including your former self that, today, feels so far away, it seems unfathomable that the person in the story was you. “Was that really me? It seems like that was someone else altogether.” That’s because it was. You were someone else. But now you’re not.

It’s easy to excuse ourselves from making a change, especially when the change is hard. “I’ve always been bad at running. There’s no way I can get better now.” But you are not “just you,” the same you you’ve always been. From one day to the next, it sure feels that way. But year after year, decade after decade? Almost nothing about you is fixed.

You are not who you were ten years ago, so there’s no reason why you must be the same you you were yesterday either. You are not you. All of “you” is in the past. You are only whoever you choose to be today. That choice can be one that makes people say, “Oh yeah, that totally sounds like him!” but it can also be one that makes them — even you — react with something like, “Really? You did that? I can hardly imagine!”

Whatever your art, chances are, you can look at sad statistics all day long. Your posts don’t get enough views. Your affiliate links don’t get enough clicks. Your invites don’t get enough responses.

Even home life can be dominated by numbing numbers. Your average heating bill is too high. Your bakery keeps raising prices. Your kid’s scores at school are too low.

Don’t get me started on the news. Your country’s GDP is in trouble. The population is aging. Chronic diseases are on the rise. The media is one big rodeo of fear-inducing figures.

You can look at all the numbers in your life, feel depressed, and zone out on the couch, or you can ignore them, put on some pants, and make something anyway.

Life happens one good deed at a time. Numbers are just observations, and without you trying your best, there’d be nothing to observe at all. Focus on the doing, not the tracking. Life is better that way.

Usually, the days when you most wonder why you even continue to do what you’re doing are the days when it’s most important to push through. Not because of the results you’ll generate on that day but because it reinforces a big decision you made a long time ago.

You may no longer be sure whether it was the right decision to make, but if you quit when you feel down, you’ll never know. Only if you re-evaluate from a strong, healthy position can you really adjust course — and to get back to that position, you’ll have to push through. For now, maintain the decision, and live to fight another day.

It is far better, and much easier, to stay on the wrong path a few days too long than it is to reset the counter to zero, warp back to the beginning, and start from scratch only to realize you were right all along.

When in doubt, first, keep going. You can always backtrack later, but on your journey so far, every step has mattered — and perhaps taking a few more is all you need to do to get back on track.

Most people learn early on that music is a great way to process and express our feelings. In high school, boys listen to rock when they’re pumped and metal when they’re angry. Girls listen to sad ballads when they’re heartbroken and pop when they’re in love. But few people ever realize that music can also affect and change our feelings. That it’s a tool we can use to direct our emotions rather than just feel them.

This, too, is a process most of us are familiar with — we just rarely take it into our own hands. As a baby, your parents might have played you soft music to get you to fall asleep. The calming harmonies playing in the background of a spa or massage parlor actively help your muscles relax. And the Super Bowl halftime show isn’t an Adele concert for a reason: It’s supposed to get you amped up for the second half.

I understand the desire to choose music that gives your feelings credence. It’s a useful habit — but only to an extent. You can play sad songs for a while after you got dumped, but if sad songs is all you play for months on end, how are you supposed to get back to happy?

Immerse yourself in music that matches your emotions, but set deadlines for those emotions. Decide to make deliberate breaks where you change the playlist and thus change your feelings. Flip from songs about heartbreak to songs about savoring life to the fullest, or turn a slow, meandering lo-fi beat into a focused, forceful EDM anthem to transform reflective thinking into decisive action.

The roads of mood and music are two-lane streets. Make sure you drive on them in both directions depending on where you’re trying to go.

On the rare few occasions when I ended up in Michelin star restaurants as a young adult, I never quite got the memo. I could see there was a level of sophistication, technique, and presentation not present in normal restaurants, but I didn’t understand what any of that was for.

Almost 20 years later, my understanding may have improved just a bit. On my 33rd birthday, I went to a one-star restaurant, and the dishes all seemed familiar yet entirely new. The menu included veal tartare, some German Brotzeit, duck breast, a piña colada, and an apple donut.

I know, right? Most of these don’t sound much like fine dining at all. But the veal tartare wasn’t just a blob of raw meat on a plate. The apple donut looked nothing like those you can get from Krispy Kreme. And the piña colada actually wasn’t a drink at all — and may therefore best serve to illustrate the point.

Imagine ordering the classic cocktail, but instead of a tall glass filled with cheap rum, greasy coconut milk, and pineapple juice from the can, you get a dessert bowl. At the bottom, you spot tiny cubes of what appears to be pineapple ragout. Smack dab in the middle of it sits a perfectly round circle of coconut panna cotta. That, in turn, is topped with some crispy-looking structure in the shape of a snowflake, and finally, atop the whole creation, rests a spoonful of lime sorbet.

“A piña colada? Really?” you think, but as you dig in, the first bite of this artsy creation immediately removes any doubts: “Wow! Incredible! It actually tastes like a piña colada — except I can taste every single ingredient and the totality of the dish — at the same time!”

You had no idea a piña colada could look like this, taste like this, feel like this, but it does — and that, I believe, is the point of one-star dining. It is meant to reintroduce you to the familiar, to present you with dishes you’ve had a thousand times at your down-the-street pub but show you that those same dishes can be so much more, all without losing any of the characteristics that make them your lovable, affordable, everyday favorites.

Done right, fine dining isn’t a snobby privilege for the wealthy. It’s a perspective shift that’ll both renew your appreciation of your daily meals as they are and help you see the true potential of what they can become with a little more skill, creativity, and design.

I don’t need nor would ever recommend fancy food on an everyday basis, but if you can afford it, try it once every blue moon. Look beyond the plate, and chances are, you’ll see a lot more than just salt, sugar, and fat.

Life doesn’t ask you whether it’s a good time to halve your income, send you a case of back pain, or reveal that your brother has lost his job and needs support. Sometimes, all three might happen at once. Ironically, we’re often well-prepared for more bad news. We may whine and say, “Why me? Why me again?” but since we’re already dealing with one crisis, a second one might just faze us a little less. “Oh well, guess I’ll figure this out, too.”

We half-expect bad fortune to be ill-timed because, well, that’s what bad luck is all about. With good fortune, however, we can have a much tougher time. We’re skeptical of lucky breaks in general, let alone multiple of them occurring in our lives at once. But if we don’t believe we deserve some good luck — and we hardly ever do — we might outright refuse to accept it or, at the very least, talk it down into our current, acceptable level of misery.

“I don’t deserve this.” “This will never last.” “Life is being too good to me.” But good fortune, too, cannot be timed. You must accept and savor it whenever it comes. Sometimes, you’ll find a $50 dollar bill on your way home from a bad day at work. Sometimes, your job search may go nowhere for months, but in the meantime, love will find you. Don’t treat these blessings as glitches in the Matrix. Recognize them for what they are: a stroke of luck at an odd time.

Perhaps, good fortune at a bad time is not meant to remind you of your challenging situation. Maybe, it is simply a reminder that better times are to come again. An auspicious sign that you’re on your way up instead of down — and even if it wasn’t, wouldn’t you much rather interpret it that way?

Choose optimism regardless of what fate delivers in the mail, and then go and apply yourself to it. Sooner or later, your world will lighten up again — and it won’t require any lucky breaks at all.