Category: Personal

Small Joys

Oops. Got caught up in some journaling, so I’m late on this one.

Today Holidailies says: Share your best advice for surviving the holiday season.

I’ve answered this last year, on December 3. My answer was to protect your peace, namely by saying no to things and people who disrupt it. You don’t have to do all of the things and you don’t have to see all of the people.

This year, I’m suggesting saying yes, but to the small joys that can still be found in an ever-demoralizing world. There’s a lot going on around the world, as there always is, with war, natural disasters, economic instability, and social upheaval. If you’re in the United States, 2025 has been a whammy of political insanity. For all intents and purposes, the country is collapsing under a regime led by a megalomaniac who has one foot in the grave and wants to ruin as much on his way out as he can. Wherever you turn, there’s bad news.

And yet, wherever you turn, there lies the opportunity for a small joy.

Fill a bird-feeder and watch our feathered friends flit around. Look at how the sun shines on their feathers, listen to their little chirps and songs.

Make a giant mug of hot chocolate. Dump in some marshmallows and top it off with whipped cream. Sit under a quilt, take a sip, and let the whipped cream dot the tip of your nose.

Listen to your favorite music. Play the same song over and over again as many times as you want. This song has 1,046,490,278 plays on Spotify. I think I’m responsible for those last 278 of them. The music sounds like we’re being flung out into some kind of giant cosmic nightclub. I love it.

Call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a long time. Let the friendship pick up like it was just yesterday. Listen to how happy they are to hear from you. You’ll hear it in their voice.

Sleep late. Like, really late. Past noon. Get up, have lunch. Then read a good book. If you need a nap, take a nap.

Put on something comfortable and stretch. Feel how everything extends and loosens up.

Hold the door open for someone else, just to do it.

Make a donation to your favorite charity.

Light your favorite candle.

Watch your favorite comedy. Or spooky movie. Or musical. Or drama.

Help your kids build a snowman.

Draw something fun on the sidewalk with sidewalk chalk.

Play solitaire with real cards. Or have a game night with friends.

Stroll through a museum.

Get on the floor and romp around with your dog. Let your cat judge you both.

Take a hot bath with a million tea lights around you like they do in the movies.

Look up at the stars.

Scroll through your phone at pictures of the good times.

Go down a YouTube rabbithole of old commercials. Send the links to friends your age. Every time I see a montage of commercials from the 70s and 80s, it’s like I’m a kid again. “I had that! And that! Remember that?”

Buy something small on sale that you never tried before. I’ve discovered vanilla cream seltzer for 89 cents for a 33-ounce bottle, and the other day I managed to snag five of them for a dollar.

Small joys like that are sustainable. They’re what will get us all through both the season and whatever earthly turmoil surrounds us. Post ’em if you’ve got ’em. I’m always looking for fresh ideas.

A Christmas ornament in the shape of a snowman, with a small tag that says "joy."

A Dimmer

My mind is a bit muddled tonight, like my brain is saturated in goo, owing to a whopping two hours of sleep. I just didn’t feel tired when last my head hit a pillow, perhaps because I forgot to turn on my blue light filter, f.lux. That app is a lifesaver when I remember to use it. It gradually turns your screen a dark salmon color as the sun sets outside. The idea is to keep your eyes from tricking your brain into thinking it’s daylight. Daywalkers need that like a hole in the head, so I’m glad for the wonders of modern technology that counter the other wonders of modern technology.

No, this is not sponsored content. I’ve been using that app for years. An ex-boyfriend who was partially color-blind hated it, so when I stayed at his place and wanted to keep him from looking over my shoulder while I was reading or writing, I’d turn it on.

See, one night, before you could stream YouTube directly out of your TV, I VERY STUPIDLY agreed to hook up my laptop to his huge flat-screen so we could indulge our sadistic humor with some FAIL videos. I had another tab open on my browser which just happened to display an old private blog of mine that had some randy fiction I had written when earthly pleasures like that still interested me. He clicked on the tab and the first line to the story on the screen was a doozy: Jake was always up for a good, hard fuck.

“NICE.”

“Oops. I had forgotten about that.”

“Who’s Jake?”

Ah, crap. Here we go.

“Don’t worry. This entire blog is fiction.”

“But who IS he?”

“It’s FICTION.”

“Who’s it ABOUT?”

“NO one.”

After about four rounds of that I said, “Will you look at the date on this, please? It was before I divorced my ex-husband.”

“So it’s about HIM?”

“No. I said it was FICTION.”

“So you made it up?”

“That’s what fiction is, yes?”

“I guess.”

I don’t think he bought it because for three months after that he kept trying to figure out who Jake was.

Anyway, that’s when I started turning f.lux on as a deterrent whenever I was reading or writing on my laptop at his place. That was about 12 years ago, so it’s an old app.

And this, kids, is why you don’t go poking around your beloved’s laptop when your beloved is a writer. You might up in said writer’s public blog years after you break up.

Now I need refreshment, so I leave you with this:

An oil slick, with a haiku that says "dark prism/slips over surface/suffocation"
Image: Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash

The Void Is So Full

The Milky Way Galaxy as seen from Earth at night.
Image: Graham Holtshausen on Unsplash

Is it really mid-May already? When last we left off, it was the end of February. So much for my New Year’s Resolution of maintaining this blog.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t write in an online journal in April at all, but to check in a couple of times. I took a month off from all of that, and writing in a paper journal, just to rest and see if I could regain some semblance of motivation for anything as things had become a relentless grind since January. Get up, log on, work, log off, eat, watch TV, sleep, rinse, repeat.

I’m still a bit stuck, but have concluded that I’m in that weird place Carl Jung talked about when he described how people lose motivation after their awakening, enantiodromia. I’ve stopped chasing, stopped worrying about to-do lists, stopped caring about hustle, proving myself, and achieving—all the things that keep Washington, the institution running—and now find myself thinking “How much of this really matters?”

Part of it is that I’ve made some time to refocus on Zen and Stoicism. The first “rule” of both of them is to concern yourself only with what you can control: your actions, reactions, thoughts, and perceptions. The second “rule” is to let go of what you cannot control, and oofta, there’s a LOT of stuff I cannot control, like other people’s behavior and reactions, the evil in the world, and what happens around me.

When I stopped to think of all the things I can’t control, I started bowing out.

I will not engage in political discussions beyond agreeing with strangers’ social media posts. Someone wants to think I’m wrong? Okay.

Someone didn’t respond to a text? Okay.

Someone doesn’t have time to get together? Okay.

Someone doesn’t want to reschedule after breaking plans? Okay.

Someone didn’t respond to an email or call at work? Okay.

Someone gets angry after asking me to do something for them and I set a boundary and say no? Okay.

Traffic? Okay.

Bad weather? Okay.

Number I didn’t want to see on the scale? Okay.

No one wants to join me in something I’m doing or going where I’m going? Okay.

I’m not chasing. I’m not forcing. I’m not striving to make any points, get people to agree, impress, perform, or bring people into my sphere who don’t want to be there. I welcome those who are with me, let go of those who aren’t.

At any rate, that’s why I haven’t been around. I’m in what the video below describes as the Hermit stage, the phase between death and rebirth, and it’s all swirling around with rising detachment in the Zen sense. But I’m still floundering around a bit. Although I’ve begun to say no to things that don’t resonate, I’m still learning to let go of wanting things to be the way I want them to be rather than how they are. I just have to trust the process.