Hello friends,
Full disclosure: I'm writing at the absolute last possible minute before I want to send out this letter, which is to say today. This morning. My morning. My sneaky secret advantage is that most of you are in the States, fast asleep, and I am already hours ahead in the near-future of having my tea and toast and scrambling to get shit done before anyone notices I’ve dropped the ball.
I procrastinated this long because the thing I'd planned to write about–learning–yes, that old chestnut, just never quite materialized into something I wanted to say. It will at some point, but nothing interesting has yet made its way to the surface. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of some good advice from one of my workshop sessions this week: Give everything a deadline before you start writing. Well I did, I say smugly, and it didn’t work.
Except that actually it kind of did work, because I managed to to crank out these pathetic few words and ship them off into your inboxes. My deadline was today, Thursday, as it is and will continue to be for sending out this letter every week, at least until I decide, or maybe you tell me that Thursdays are no good for you, try out Mondays, or you know what, go back to Sundays, that was perfect, why did you stop? (Please do tell me!)
There's a phrase I learned from my work on habit design with BJ Fogg; you've heard me use it before, probably a few times because it's never stopped being relevant and useful: what's the smallest thing you can do that shows success? Some of his examples are deliberately absurd: can you floss one tooth? can you put on one running shoe? But what he's asking is really just, can you show up? In a Yoga With Adriene session the other day, she asked the same thing: can you press play?
I can, and I did.
And considering all the times I chose not to show up, all the times I felt like I didn’t have the energy, or that nothing I had to say was worth sharing, well, this feels like a result. Here I am, I made it. See you next week.
I’m just going halfsies this week. The past few issues were kinda full-on, weren’t they?
1. To Be (or not to be) a Writer on Twitter (Medium)
Twitter is somewhere I haven't been showing up, neither as a writer nor as a right-minded person, and I'm still wondering whether it's worth the existential effort. I engage in a little self-talk about my fence-sitting this week on Atta Girl, a Medium publication for women the "internet doesn’t think are cool anymore."
(We beg to differ.)
2. The Coming Conflict Between Introverts and Extroverts
As the world, and thus our social lives ease open again, showing up actually is half the battle between introverts and extroverts, according to this article in The Atlantic: “Post-vaccine life may breed some misunderstandings between the extroverts who want to dive headfirst into a sea of other people and the introverts who are excited to see their friends but don’t want to pack their schedules so full that they have no time to just be.”
3. Killing them with kindness
Who else is (finally) watching Ted Lasso? "Ted Lasso isn’t just a show about a coach who cares about his players more than wins and losses. It’s also a show about the way we wish the world would be," writes Emily VanDerWerff in Vox. And am I the only one who finds it a very on-the-nose coincidence that Jason Sudeikis' now-former partner Olivia Wilde is supposedly dating Harry Styles? I can only assume they are all treating one another with kindness.
4. When less is actually more
Showing up isn't a mandate. It's about meeting our intentions and living up to our ideas of who we want to be. So for whoever needs to hear this, you don't need to say yes to everything. Surrender to the Joy of Missing Out.
5. A “sympathetic resonance”
Feelin' yourself? It's all about the vibe. From my favorite read this week in the New Yorker: "In a recent newsletter, the writer Mary Retta explained that she had been “vibing” throughout quarantine: “Not doing anything, and yet not doing nothing; refusing a schedule, ignoring your watch, but still filling days with intention, somehow.” Vibes can be an adjustment to circumstances, an almost defensive pursuit of harmony. “To vibe is to shape time into pleasure,” Retta wrote."