Category — Uncategorized

I was gifted a TisBest Charity Gift Card. It works like any other gift card, and you spend it at one (or several) of the 1.5 million charities listed in their database.

My card was for $100, and we could give it all to one organization or split it between two to three organizations. My first instinct was to make another donation to a place where we had already donated this winter, but Josh pointed out that we had 1.5 million options. It was a pretty heady experience.

We started listing causes that make us who we are. What was important to us? LGBTQ rights, anti-racism work, animal conservation, environmental protection, food security, clean water… the list grew longer and longer, especially once we started diving into TisBest’s curated lists by topic.

The hardest part of this gift was narrowing down the list to three charities because there were so many good places on the list. And not immediately having a “but we forgot about!” moment the minute we hit submit on our choices. Of course, there is always next time.

I had never heard of this before receiving one, so I’m passing along the idea if people are looking for an off-the-beaten-path gift. It was a lot of fun to play philanthropist for the day.

Carolyn Hax had a column a few weeks back with a wonderful little nugget towards the end of her answer. The situation was about a cheating ex-boyfriend and whether a leopard changes spots. The person states they are cautiously moving forward with trying again.

Carolyn tells the person:

Some things are dangerous. Like mountain-climbing. You don’t tiptoe up, hoping the mountain has changed. You go into it knowing what you can and can’t control, equipped to handle the worst …

These are not choices that affect other people—for instance, and I’m just pulling this out of my ass, COVID-19 choices. Those choices, such as mask-wearing or staying home or taking this seriously, affect everyone else. That’s sort of a defining feature of a pandemic. It spreads. And it spreads due to human choice. If we all stayed home as the CDC has asked us to stay home, we could have stopped this from reaching the levels it has reached in the US.

But that is another post.

These are choices that affect only the people who need to live with the choice. Such as whether to follow a certain career or marry a certain person or build a family. Of course, there are other people who claim your choices affect them because your choice changes their relationship with you. But no one is owed another person following the career path they’re trying to impose (except, perhaps, the royal family) or marrying a person that meets someone else’s criteria or providing grandchildren; no matter how much we really wish the people around us would make a different choice that would make us happier.

I like that idea—the only value in a choice is how well the choice suits us. If the choice doesn’t actually suit the person, it isn’t a good choice for them. Choices, in and of themselves (except for masks and staying home), don’t have value.

We have a new toaster. The old toaster died. No one remembers when we got the old toaster. Was it 19 years old, a wedding gift? Was it a more recent addition to the kitchen? I have zero memory of how our old toaster came to live on our kitchen countertop.

The new toaster is the simplest toaster we could find. It does not do anything fancy. It is not a combination air fryer toaster. Yet it has too many knobs. Too many choices. I am too old to learn a new toaster.

I think I’m just going to skip toasting things from now on.

I should add that I have lived with Josh for almost 20 years and have yet to learn how to turn on the television. Once upon a time, I wrote out instructions. But I lost them. So if I want to watch something, I need to ask someone to turn it on and find the channel. It’s totally okay. I just skip watching television.

I know I could learn these things. I am capable. But something in me whispers, “I don’t want to” whenever the subject is broached.

A person can live without toast or television.

Something about having a new appliance made me want to walk around the house saying, “New toaster, who dis?” The ChickieNob pointed out that if a person gets a new phone, they transfer their contacts, so they would obviously know the new caller. And if they lost their phone and had to get a new phone with a new number, the caller wouldn’t know the new number unless they had been told by the phone owner. So the whole thing falls apart if you think about it too much.

I’ve had so much luck with my bullet journal, continuing to use it daily since 2014, that I often seek out other time-saving/productivity hacks to see if I’ll have equal success in getting a new idea going. Spoiler alert—so far, the answer is no. But I’m not discouraged.

The latest idea I’m explored is GYLIO or Get Your Life In Order. In a nutshell: “GYLIO is about bundling tasks into a single morning, day or week in order to clear your mind; learning to prioritise and find focus so that you can enjoy guilt-free downtime.” So instead of checking email throughout the day as it comes in, you close your inbox so you’re not distracted, and only check it during a set hour in the morning. Or Monday is laundry day, even if the hamper is overflowing on Friday. Or you set aside your worrying until 8 PM at night.

I like the concept, but I’ve never been successful at setting worrying aside for a set time, even when I’ve tried things such as jotting down what I want to worry about in the future and then returning to the task at hand.

But the point is to help you keep your focus. It’s also to create a space for everything that needs to get done. If your schedule is already full, you don’t add more to it. And if you do add something, it goes into a single slot so you’re not spending part of your time dealing with X and part of your time focused on Y, and not really taking care of X or Y well.

The BBC link above talks about setting up an admin hour in your day that you bundle small, unrelated tasks that need to get done. That becomes the time that you open your to-do list and take care of all the tiny tasks that only take a few minutes to complete but drag at your attention throughout the day. If you don’t need to use all of your “admin” hour, you get that time back. But if you have a full to-do list, you know that you have an hour set aside to power through it and can work, guilt-free, the rest of the time knowing all those items will get done.

I’m thinking of adding this twice a week to my life and seeing if I end up making dreaded phone calls where I’ve been dragging my feet or finally unclog the sink. We’ll see.

I recently read Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, and it was lovely. I’ll unpack the book more when I review the books for the month in mid-December. But it was one of those books that I covered in multiple underlined passages. I hate to repeat the word again, mostly because it also sounds (and, frankly, is) wishy-washy, but they were really lovely thoughts that popped up where I didn’t expect them.

One of them came on page 259, when the police officer remembers his mother’s words:

“We can’t change the world, and a lot of the time we can’t even change people. No more than one bit at a time. So we do what we can to help whenever we get the chance, sweetheart. We save those we can. We do our best. Then we try to find a way to convince ourselves that we will just have to… be enough. So we can live with our failures without drowning.”

No more than one bit at a time. And that has to be enough.

It begs the question: where is the “worth it” line when it comes to enough; the small acts we can do that barely impact the world or even other humans, but they’re what is left in our control. For instance, we recycle all recyclable items. But even if everyone recycled all recyclable item, it may not be enough to impact the environment because recycling isn’t the panacea we were promised it would be. Don’t get me wrong—it’s still the right thing to do. But recycling isn’t the same as not using plastic items in the first place. It’s a better act that comes with its own limitations, still impacting the environment only less-so.

So that is what I mean by the worth-it line. Is recycling worth it? It’s a small act that costs nothing except a little extra time. So, yes, even if the impact is tiny, it’s worth it. Though the worth is tempered by the fact that everyone needs to do it to have an impact. Is one person recycling all the recyclable items worth it?

It feels like the worth of the act is only defined by not doing it. That reaching out to another person may not change anything at all, but not reaching out to another person will almost definitely have a negative impact if they’re suffering. That recycling may not change anything at all, but not recycling will almost definitely have a negative impact by being one more item taking up space in a landfill. So the worth-it line is eternally set as something-is-better-than-nothing.

Even when something isn’t enough.