Dive in
1
WHEN BAD IS GOOD
What if, at the new year, instead of resolving to be “better” versions of ourselves, we use what the world tells us are our worst habits and traits to enhance our lives? Would we be more satisfied people? I think so. Just as identifying an emotion we’re feeling frees us to move through and past it, seeing ourselves through a gentler lens helps us become more fully ourselves, which is a recipe for happiness and self-validation.
The author describes several ways we can embrace our full selves with kindness and relax into the accompanying tranquility of acceptance.
My favorites:
Learn to love negative emotions—Have you ever found yourself in the midst of struggle and had someone respond with toxic positivity (as in, “Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, I just know it!”)? Or maybe you’ve been the one voicing those platitudes because it’s uncomfortable to sit in sadness, even with someone else? Let that urge go for a minute. Shed your problem-solving gear and listen. Be quiet in the darkness. You’ll make it through to the light, and you’ll be brighter for it.
Be moderately disorganized—As a moderately disorganized person, I like the idea of embracing that side of myself rather than flexing my self-shaming muscle, the one that tells me I’d be more worthy if only I spent more time cleaning (patriarchy and gendered expectations are the best, amirite?). For me, this means finding the balance between order and disorder and, by extension, between time spent cleaning and time spent nurturing (my creativity, my friendships, my relationships).
Love your clutter—By some standards, my home is cluttered and by others, it’s austere. Clutter is in the eye of the beholder, and what makes one person feel enveloped in cozy comfort overwhelms another. What makes my clutter work for me is that my clutter is mostly made up of things I love—stacks of books, piles of onions (can food be clutter?), a wall teeming with taped-up artwork, a windowsill lined with the few plants I’ve managed to accidentally keep alive. Do what works for you, not what perfectly composed photos on the internet tell you is the pinnacle of home design.
Abandon meaningfulness (and its related entry, care less)—I don’t know how to do this yet myself, but I’m convinced it will lighten the load of bricks perched precariously atop my shoulders. If you have tips, please share.
2
WE’RE HAVING A MOMENT HERE
Existential moment time. (It’s not a crisis. It’s a moment. A thought exercise. An exploration. Really.)
For me, the details of most days’ past are murky, which is to say that I’m not one of those people with photographic recall of each day. I keep a daily journal, and if I miss a day and try to backfill yesterday’s log, it’s strenuous to remember even what I had for dinner. Reading this, you may think that my life is one big blur up to the very moment I’m in, but it’s not, and perhaps you understand why because you may experience something similar: the blur of the past is punctuated by memories so clear, rendered in such sharp detail, that a single prompt brings them immediately to the forefront of thought.
Back to the crisis. I mean, moment.
To set the scene, it was pre-pandemic, when we all went to the office most days, sharing the same air like that was no big deal. Lunchtime. A quiet day, though. Maybe a Friday? I was building a friendship with a colleague, but it was early days, and we were still tending to its foundation, laying small vulnerabilities side by side, strengthening our connection with the mortar of shared perspectives and similar histories. Our interactions had almost always taken place either a. surrounded by other colleagues (social), or b. whiteboarding project ideas together (work); we hadn’t established a precedent for connecting without a buffer, with our barriers down, our beating hearts exposed.
Okay, so: Nascent friendship. Lunched together, usually in a group but not this day. Both of us parents of young kids. Both of us pondering what even is life. Both of us thinking about how we birthed humans without their consent, brought these people into the world who wouldn’t be here without our decision to make them, these children who will, inevitably, experience pleasure and pain, delight and sorrow, peace and tumult, whose futures could be things of beauty, or not, though most likely a combination thereof. Both of us considering that we too were brought into this world without our consent, that we have lived and loved and felt good and bad, joyous and despairing, that we’ve been muddling our way through from abrupt beginning to as-yet-uncharted end.
It got kinda deep there for a while that one day at lunch in the office. And that memory sparkles clearly in my mind. The feeling of connection. Of kinship. Of a shared story, an aligned perspective, a similar outlook. Of fear and hope. Trepidation and trust. A budding friendship suddenly rooted.
The blur stretches on either side of that memory; I don’t know the specifics of what I did in the days prior or beyond, but I remember viscerally this conversation about the meaning of life (or lack thereof—we didn’t solve the equation over lunch and still haven’t).
More recently, an author wrestled with essentially the same topic: none of us consented to being here, yet here we are, so what’s the point? Is there a point? Do we even need a point to value this life we’re in? Is life “beautiful enough to ‘replicate’”?
I expect life and purpose may be controversial topics, and each one of you will have a different perspective on them, whether informed by trust in science, religion, both, neither, or something else completely. I’m sharing here an essay that resonated with me, not in an attempt to change your mind or assert mine, but to open a door to meaning and to the questions therein. I love that this writer focused on the beauty of life, and I especially love the crystalline memory it surfaced, of friendship and connection, curiosity and wonder, of these lives we live that are beautiful enough to replicate.
3
LOST IN DELIGHT
Delight: great pleasure, joy, rapture, extreme satisfaction
I love the word delight. Writer Ross Gay has written two whole books full of essays on the singular topic of delights (listen to his talk with Dan Harris on the same topic here). I overuse the term—everything is a delight or delightful or I am delighted. How can I not? I want delight in my life. Give me gratuitous joy. I want to delight in the world, to submerge my senses in that which delights me—pie with ice cream for breakfast, a sunset glimpsed through a window as I rushed by (then s l o w i n g to let that light filter in and fill me), a song obsession on repeat, a sweet interaction with a stranger, a sweeter interaction with someone I know, a warm cookie alongside a glass of cold milk, a beautiful sentence encountered in an unexpected place, a smile just for me (or you).
I hate to burst this delightful bubble, but now I’m going to tell you where delight isn’t always the right foundational element: UX design. I’ve shocked you, I know. Here I was raving on about delight—it’s so good, it’s everywhere if you open yourself to it, potential delight is around every corner, etc. etc.—then bam, no delight in design.
It’s not that black and white (surprise). But to start: when you get too wild with your overall website design, it often leads to unintuitive interaction patterns that leads to overall user frustration. Don’t give up ease of use for something cute. And remember, things that are cute the first time you encounter them don’t always delight again (and again).
I’m not in favor of the bland-ification of web design (though it’s hard to avoid—”the age of average” is coming for every part of our lives, even our faces). We’re already design lemmings who tend to create (and feel comfortable with) that which is on trend and those things we’re familiar with. But I’m in favor of usability. And delight fits in there, just not on every surface.
Find ways to build delight into your designs—in unexpectedly fun text your customer encounters on the first run or in a warm message sharing a new feature. Just remember, delight gets stale (and undelightful) fast, so use it judiciously.
4
WITHOUT CHILDCARE
A beautiful opening line—crisp, evocative, sensual—draws the reader in, encourages them to stay awhile, is a hand held open that we only need clasp to be led forward. Or it would be, if there weren’t children underfoot during the writing process.
5
DIVER, REVISITED
As a child I dabbled in soccer and t-ball before settling on being a gymnast. I say “being a gymnast” lightly because, though I was eager, obsessed even, I wasn’t a great gymnast; I was solidly mediocre. I worked hard, and then I got too tall and started falling off the bars in graceless heaps, so when I started high school, I joined the diving team, the perfect place for a retired (14-year-old) gymnast.
I would throw anything those days—if my coach told me to try for a double front flip, I’d go for it; a reverse one-and-a-half? Totally. My gymnast training and teenage brain combined to make me confident and fearless.
I’m not fearless on a diving board anymore; in fact, I’ve avoided diving for most of my adulthood, afraid of losing control, of smacking the water hard, landing face first with my eyes open—afraid, mostly, of hurting myself.
Then I read this article about the playfulness, the unvarnished childlikeness of diving, and the next time I came across a diving board, I jumped. I swam to the edge, got out. I climbed the stairs. I dove.