music / books / food / and everything else
I’ve been working on putting together a new playlist every month but never got around to sharing this one from November—aka the unofficial start of seasonal depression season. I missed making a playlist for December and haven’t gotten around to making one for January yet, but since we’re still in the thick of winter gloom and a collective post-holiday hangover, I think this playlist is still pretty appropriate.
Have a listen!
The last couple months were stressful. A family health scare consumed most of my time and energy, but things have leveled out now and I’m able to think more clearly again.
I took two weeks off of work for the holidays and to rest my brain. I returned yesterday, still a little unclear about my direction, so I spent most of the day thinking about goals for this year. They mainly revolve around making/saving more money to move to California, which isn’t all that exciting, so I decided to spice things up and create a new daily goal for each month of the year. Every January I do Yoga with Adriene’s 30 day yoga series which always adds a little excitement to the month. I was thinking about how to apply that new year energy to the rest of the year and came up with daily goals for the remaining months:
January: Do yoga every day
February: Meditate every day
March: Read every day
April: List to a podcast every day
May: Go for a walk every day
June: Wake up at 7am every day
July: No TV for the month
August: Talk to/text/message a friend/family member every day
September: Take 1 photo every day
October: Do some art every day
November: Write every day
December: Listen to 1 new album every day
Hoping I can build some new, good habits in the process and add some positive energy to each day. I tried to make all these habits really doable so I wouldn’t set myself up for failure. I’m a little nervous about June—my sleeping habits have always been pretty erratic—but waking up early is something I’ve been wanting to train myself to do for a long time, and this seems like the right opportunity to work on it. I’ll report back on how this all goes.
Hey friends, I made us a playlist for October. I only included songs that I thought would fit on the soundtrack for a creepy, mindbending horror movie, so if that’s your jam, give it a listen!
Are you willing to embrace that truly slight inconvenience — and maybe pay a few dollars more — so that a person’s job is significantly less shitty? Think about in practice: are you willing to wait five more minutes for an Uber so that, when you get in, you know that your drive has health insurance and is making a living wage? Are you willing to pay $4 more for your yoga class (YOUR YOGA CLASS!) so that your teacher, who you likely venerate, can have some semblance of the stability/peace you yourself are attempting to find BY GOING TO YOGA??? Are you willing to have slightly less so that others can have significantly more? Or, as I like to think about it, do you actually care about other people?
Lately, lots of us are thinking and talking about burnout. How our work and daily routines are making us tired and sucking the joy out of our lives. We’re starting to think about what actions we can take to alleviate the feeling of burnout in our own lives. But this article asks us to think about how our actions can create burnout in other people.
In a small sense, that means respecting the boundaries of our colleagues, friends and family in a golden rule type fashion (do unto others…etc). But in a larger sense, that means buying into systems that respect those boundaries and allow us feel like real humans instead of meaningless cogs in the capitalist machine. And maybe MAYBE making a small, slightly uncomfortable impact on our own lives in an effort to make a much larger, game-changing impact on someone else’s life.
I think this idea is so important and one we don’t often think about. Don’t we all just want everything cheaper, faster, bigger? If it comes at the expense of another person’s wellbeing and financial stability, personally I’d rather have it a little more expensive, slower and smaller.
I found this article courtesy of Jocelyn K. Glei‘s newsletter which always has really great links about work, creativity, and making your life more enjoyable.
I intend to be the kind of person who does what she says she’ll do. It mostly doesn’t work out that way, but the intention is there. I make to-do lists so at the very least there’s evidence that I’m alive and trying. Here’s what I’m trying at this fall:
What are you trying at this season?
sooo many things 