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I thought this was really good advice, so I’m passing it along in case it resonates with you, too. It speaks to artists, but I think everyone — regardless of your job or if you don’t have a job — enters a scarcity mindset from time to time.

She defines the scarcity mindset:

Scarcity mindset is the state of believing that what you want is in limited supply. That you will never have enough of that thing.

You could have this feeling around money, time, connections, status, or security. If you experience scarcity around connection, you feel lonely. If you experience scarcity around status, you feel undervalued.

It’s any time that you feel anxious that you don’t have enough or you’re somehow behind or you’ll never catch up to peers, and it almost always accompanies a comparison because without that benchmark, how can your brain know how you stack up?

She doesn’t just provide the definition. She goes into the three things that happen when you’re in a scarcity mindset and ways to tackle it. I’ve been using her recommendation to set a timer, do the task, and walk away. If you reached your goal (e.g., write for a half hour or send three job applications), then it doesn’t matter how anyone else does. You’ve reached your own finish line.

There is a lot of scarcity messaging out there, keeping that idea that you don’t have enough or you’re getting behind front and center in our brains. Find the source and remove it. It’s not that it’s not true — things are pretty bad out there right now — but you don’t need to keep hearing the message.

When we woke up on Sunday morning, we could tell it would be the last day. Beorn had been progressively getting worse — he had been to the vet twice in the past week — and while he could swallow water, he couldn’t swallow his critical care.

We debated taking him to an emergency vet about an hour away (most vets don’t specialize in guinea pigs), but as he rested in my arms, I realized that the kinder thing would be to help him go. The infection hadn’t responded to three rounds of antibiotics. He looked so exhausted.

So we held him from a little after 9 am until after 8 pm. That still wasn’t enough, but we wanted him to feel loved for every second of his last day on earth. So we stroked him and listed all of the people who loved him. He FaceTimed with the kids a few times — that was really the only time he perked up when he heard his best friends’ voices. But mostly he rested in our arms and got head rubs and back rubs. We thanked him for helping us through the pandemic and the kids leaving for college. And we told him he was the best pig in the world.

Around 7 pm, he started having seizures. We told him we were so sorry that we didn’t know the solution, and he rested between convulsions and snuggled deeper into my arms. A little after 7:30, he died. He let out one long last breath, then went still and sank a little deeper into my arms. We FaceTimed the kids so they could say goodbye, too, and we gave him last kisses on his head from each person who loved him.

Holding someone I love so deeply, who I needed so badly, and helping them go hurt a lot. It was such an impossibly hard thing to do but it was maybe the most important eleven hours of our relationship. I feel so grateful that we got to be with him until the end. That he was cuddled until the end.

The house feels very empty. I’m still cleaning up his things, but entering the living room and not seeing my pig breaks my heart over and over again. He was my best companion, my always friend, and it is hard to go through the day without him.

The Westing Game was one of my favourite books growing up, and I loved reading it with the twins. All of her books hold a special place on my shelf.

So I was thrilled when Publishers Weekly announced that her estate found two unpublished books, including a sequel to The Westing Game. It’s not written in the style of Ellen Raskin (like Sophie Hannah’s new Agatha Christies) but written by the late Ellen Raskin and squirreled away for years.

Though the strange thing is that one of the books shows up on Google Books as having been published in 2011, and it’s up on GoodReads. This is a mystery fit for… Ellen Raskin characters!

I just love the idea that someone could be gone for a long time — she died in 1984 — and 41 years later, you can read an announcement that you’re getting two new books from her estate. The world is an amazing place.

Morra Aarons-Mele is one of the smartest people I know, and I love her LinkedIn newsletter. She recently wrote about moving her mother into a memory care unit, and she outlined a hard choice model, pointing out the difference between four types of difficult choices.

Big decisions are not all alike.

I mean, we know this instinctively, but seeing it in the squares made me realize how often I brought the same decision-making anxiety to situations that fall in different categories, such as “big choice” and “hard choice.” And how they actually require different mental framing.

But what I loved was her acknowledgment that we can never know if the choices we make is the “right” choice because we never see the other option play out. Maybe even if things turn out well, the other option would have been better. Knowing that we can’t know can be terrifying OR it can be liberating. It’s not about getting everything right. It’s about making a choice and accepting the situation until the next decision comes along.

She writes,

I made the practical choice, which I hope is also the loving choice. The truth is we’ll never know, and that’s the reality of hard decisions. You just do the best you can with the information that you have at the time.

Go read her newsletter if you’re not already getting it.

You know I love games. This is really good game with sticking power. I’ve had it on my phone for a few weeks, and I play it daily.

368 Chickens is a puzzle game where you get two chickens each turn, and you have to place them on a board. Get three or more chickens of the same kind in a row, and it clears the squares and removes three (or more) from your chicken count. The idea is to get it down to zero chickens without filling the board.

A little like Tetris, but you have more time to think about where you are placing your chicken pair. My best game was 92 chickens, but I usually end the game with 250 chickens.