Category — Uncategorized

After a few months of walking to television shows, ChickieNob and I returned to first-person walking videos (on mute) coupled with audiobooks. The first-person walking videos make me feel like we’re going somewhere. Television does not.

We listened to Lesley Manville read the first Thursday Murder Club book. We both read it years ago but had no memory of the mystery solution. I mean, I remembered one tiny part, but everything else slipped out of my head in the intervening years.

I got to experience the book practically for the first time again. But I reacted differently to the parts I remembered. I’m a different person now, which comes into play when reading a book a second (or third or fourth) time.

Afterward, we were going to go on to the second book in the series, but we opted to play The Magicians instead. It’s our comfort read (or, in this case, our comfort listen), and we immediately settled into reciting our favourite lines from the story as we figuratively walked through Mykonos. Again, we’re both different people each time we read or hear it, but it was like getting coffee with a good friend and realizing how much you both still feel connected to one another.

Thank you, books.

I always say that the only safe people to get behind are Tom Hanks, Barack Obama, and Mr. Rogers. Tom Hanks is always called the nicest guy in Hollywood, and the challenge to push back against that is too tempting for trolls. So if they haven’t been able to steer the narrative in another direction, he’s a safe bet.

Barack Obama is in the same situation. I’m sure his detractors have been searching for dirt for years. If they could find anything, they would have used it. He is probably as good as he seems.

And lastly, Mr. Rogers. He’s no longer around to mess up, and we’ve been through all of the movies and articles about him after his death. If there were something to uncover, it would have been found. It’s safe to put your trust in Mr. Rogers.

Everyone else is fallible. Put a story about them in your memoir, and it could bite you in the ass later. It’s the JK Rowling effect. When she was just about her books, we had no clue that the Quidditch league would rename their game to distance themselves from her. Social media gave us a whole new side of JK Rowling to not enjoy.

This is why I found this idea of a comfort person where you cannot meet or interact with the person behind the words/images interesting. She writes:

A comfort-person relationship is a feeling of friendship and warmness that can only ever go one way. It’s a relationship that does not, and I’d argue, cannot, exist in real life.

That person isn’t really a person but a projection of what we think of them as a person. So we’re comforted by our own imagination.

I clicked over with little faith that I would actually see an impossible colour, but the article delivered. If you let your eyes relax, you see a colour that’s not there. Keep reading down the page for the explanation.

Even cooler was the exercise close to the bottom where you see the blue dot inside the black square.

I’m a sucker for optical illusions.

This is about work, but it applies to every life situation. It’s about not taking on other people’s anxiety. Ever. Their anxiety gets to be their anxiety, and your anxiety gets to stay your anxiety. He writes,

Anxiety is conductive. It wants to travel from one person to another person. And once it sees itself in another person, it feels justified in being in that first person. … To put it another way: once a client becomes anxious, their primary goal becomes to make you anxious because that justifies their own anxiety.

Don’t worry; he also explains how to contain the anxiety to the other person. Stay calm, listen, reassure that you will look into the problem, and report when you know something. (And he doesn’t mention one thing: communicate, communicate, communicate.)

I really love this idea of diffusing anxiety by not fomenting fear.

I loved this Substack from My Sweet Dumb Brain about allowing yourself to dip into life and be okay with what you are doing vs. what you’re not doing. She writes:

We live in a world of endless information and expectations. You will never read, watch, or listen to everything that you want to … Life is an endless scroll. We will never reach the endpoint that we’re looking for. I find liberation in knowing that there will never be enough.

Isn’t that kind of perfect?

Accepting the limit of 24 hours today.