Look for thin slices of joy

Notice the joyful moments in your day, however small, however fleeting. Notice how good it feels to have that first sip of your drink. Or how tasty that first bite of food is. The pleasurable feeling of your skin in warm water when you wash your hands or take a shower. The moment of delight and comfort when you see your friend.

These thin slices of joy only last a few seconds but they add up! The more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy in your life.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/happy-happy-joy-joy-1.3804787/joy-on-demand-the-three-second-fix-1.3804789

Cherish the “garbage time”

Every minute can be “quality time.” All time with your kids — all time with anyone you love — is created equal. What you do with it is what makes it special. Not where. Or for how long. Or at what cost. Eating cereal together can be wonderful. […] There is no such thing as “quality time.” Cherish the “garbage time.” It’s the best kind of time there is.

https://dailydad.com/cherish-the-garbage-time/

Pull yourself together

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. ‘How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year…

The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”

CS Lewis, 1948. https://fscsmn.org/email-article/very-applicable-to-today-written-by-cs-lewis-in-1948/

“The world doesn’t owe you a living”

He didn’t judge a man by how many times he got knocked down but by how fast he got up. ‘Get up!’ That was his phrase, and it has echoed through my life. The world dropped you on your head? My dad would say ‘Get up!’ You’re lying in bed feeling sorry for yourself? Get up! You got knocked on your ass on the football field? Get up! Bad grade? Get up! The girl’s parents won’t let her go out with a Catholic boy? Get up!

Joe Biden – Promises to keep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promises_to_Keep_(Biden_book)

Last hours of the year, so it’s time for the periodic roundup of things that I enjoyed over the past 12 months. 2020 has been a really strange year, but not everything was bad.

1. The scientific community for coming up with a vaccine in 2 days. You read that right, 2 days. Here’s for hope that this golden period of breakthroughs will have the same impact in the field of medicine as the Apollo moon landings had in the field of technology. Plus, after all this will be over, we will look back at 2020 and see it as a collective altitude training. Everything else will feel lighter and easier and we will be ready for bigger challenges.

2. Apple Watch and the Airpods for helping me stick to a healthy routine. Just like the previous years.
3. A place: Southern France. A wonderful, sunny place, full of history. To be visited again in 2021.
4. A series: Better Call Saul. I know, it made this list also in 2018. Some things don’t change. Plus, this year we got to see Lalo. Tell me again!
5. Liverpool FC for finally winning the Premier League. The first part of the year felt so good. So good that the rest of the year would not matter. But here we are still, with all the problems and top of the league again 🙂
6. Philips Hue. For the long winter nights and because the lights influence the mood.
7. A book: Andy Weir – Artemis. Quality stuff from the writer of The Martian. Had to take a day off to finish it. I loved the way it made me imagine humans living on the moon.
8. The Starship. If the humans will set foot on Mars this century, it will be in a Starship. Hopefully this will happen during our lifetime.
9. Reddit + Quora. The first one for keeping me informed, the other one for putting me to sleep 🙂
10. Working from home. Because it magically gave an extra hour to all my working days. Here’s for hope that the ‘new normal’ will be nothing like the ‘old normal’.

Just a quick note about the way we consume information during this time. My approach is to reduce the number of sources pushing information to me, and relying more on the sources where I can pull information myself.

Concretely, I unsubscribed from all the newsletters (even though most of them were pretty good) and I trimmed the list of people I follow on Twitter. At the moment, my sources of information are:

PS: a tip for reducing the time spent on Twitter is to save the interesting stories in Pocket. The goal is to read them when I pull them from Pocket, not when they are pushed to me by Twitter.