This newsletter takes a slightly different format. Also, it got a bit long.
Earlier this week I had been trying to come up with a post in the style of 50 things I know or 100 things I know, and I was struggling a bit with it. The format just wasn’t really doing it for me. Then coincidentally, in his excellent Friday newsletter, Brendan Leonard today shared a link to a similar 42 Life Lessons for My 42nd Birthday and also shared a link to his shop where you can snag a Periodic Table of the Elements of Adventure water bottle. Those concepts collided in my head to get me working on a Periodic Table of Life Lessons, which so far looks a little something like this:
Dear reader, little did I know what an undertaking this would be.
Part 1:
1 - H - Home. Home means something different to everyone. To me, home is a haven that you make for yourself and those you love.
2 - He - Humor. A sense of humor is a delight in good times and a profoundly valuable tool for coping with hard times. So much of life is ridiculous. It’s good to have a laugh.
3 - Li - Light. I take joy in the lightness of the day and in the lightness of being. I seek to bring light to others.
4 - Be - Being. To exist in peaceful abiding is a gift.
6 - C - Care. While “no f*cks given” is a popular expression for rejecting oppressive external standards, in fact we are supposed to give many f*cks. We are supposed to care about each other and the world we live in. If you are stuck in an environment that is driving you to throw up your hands and give no f*cks, then you are fighting a soul-sucking battle. Probably you should focus on spending some time engaging with who and what you care about.
7 - N - Night. I take pleasure in the mystery and dream-time of the night.
8 - O - Others. Other people matter. Other creatures matter. Everyone has a life as strange and complex and boring and astonishing as yours.
9 - F - Family. Family means something different to everyone. I was lucky to land in a family where people are kind to each other, and that makes a big difference.
10 - Ne - Nexus. A lot of modern culture revolves around commonly accepted constructs of binaries and hierarchies. But these are human inventions, ways that we try to organize the world for our own understanding. Really, everything exists in a nexus, made of up complex webs of interdependence. Kings are not more important or more interesting than construction workers, and also a construction worker can be king of a worksite, or a king can engage in building things, so that ultimately they aren’t even different, really. All the ways we think we are different from one another, and mostly they’re artifacts of circ*mstance or just roles that we happen to be playing. Adopting a nexus-oriented mindset means looking at the intersection of things.
11 - Na - Nature. Seeing the sunshine or the rain fall on green leaves, or finding a little frog under a leaf, or watching a bird look for fish in a pond: these are some of the simplest, most important things you can do for your mental health
12 - Mg - Morning. My grandma Dorothy had a simple saying when something painful or difficult happened, that “it’ll be better in the morning.” I have gone through some hard things, and in the endlessness of certain terrible long nights, I have reminded myself of this. It’s not really that the light of morning cures all, though often it’s a little easier to face things once the sun is up. Mostly it’s that time will pass, and hard things will pass, and each morning marks another page turned.
14 - Si - Silence. I appreciate the quiet. When it’s quiet, you find yourself able to hear all sorts of things that you’d been tuning out, like birdsong, or traffic on a quiet street, or your cat snoring gently in the corner. On a silent night in winter, when it snows, you can hear the shushing sound of thousands of snowflakes making their tiny crash-landing.
15 - P - Pleasure. Life is full of opportunities for pleasure. If you are living life from one complaint to the next, you are denying yourself so much enjoyment, for what? Complaining is for suckers. Put your effort into being pleased.
16 - S - Strength. My grandma Donna always liked to say that “we are strong women.” I was lucky to be raised with a set of influences that never made me question the value of being strong as a woman, or that suggested I should equate strength with dominance or aggression. It is valuable to be strong. And my grandpa Carroll regarded strength as something to share, that “the strong back carries the heavier load.” I have always taken that lesson to apply to other forms of strength as well. Strength married to selfishness is worthless.
17 - Cl - Clouds. It is good to live in a place with an ever-changing expanse of sky. The artwork up there is remarkable.
18 - Ar - Art. People make art for all kinds of reasons. Most of my favorite art takes joy in the world, or in the minute observation of some part of it, or in exploring what’s strange, what’s curious, what might be true. I think in general the best art doesn’t try to pronounce an answer but rather seeks to ask an interesting question. (I guess maybe I just like questions better than answers?)
19 - K - Kindness. You will never regret being kind. And you can be honest and kind. Kindness isn’t phony, but it can be diplomatic. You can speak truth and still consider the feelings and situation of the person to whom you’re speaking. You can tell someone they’re in the wrong, and do so with kindness. It’s easy to extend kindness to those you feel warm and fuzzy about. But can you be kind to people who have wronged you? Can you be kind to unkind people? Kindness isn’t something others earn from you by their behavior. Kindness is a choice you make yourself in what you put into the world.
20 - Ca - Calm. I laughed when I heard that this was what my partner’s mom had to say about me. “I like her. She’s so… calm.” Am I? But it’s true that when I’m with other people, I look for ways to promote good feelings and good humor and kindly interactions. And so I do think that others tend to find me a calming sort of person to be around.
21 - Sc - Scarcity. I absolutely believe that scarcity is the mother of invention. Well-resourced projects are harder to manage and harder to get off the ground than scrappy, make-do, by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of projects. If you are struggling to make headway on something, often the best thing you can do is create some tighter constraints, with a shorter runway. It’s way easier to do one thing with scarce resources than to do a dozen things with infinite resources.
22 - Ti - Time. Time is precious and fleeting, but some things are just a boring slog to get through. More than one thing can be true.
23 - V - VLOOKUP. If you use spreadsheets even semi-regularly in your work, it is worth your while to figure out how to use VLOOKUP. Be forewarned: it’s not intuitive the first couple (dozen) times you use it. Don’t let that put you off. Just look up the tutorial again. VLOOKUP will save you so much time and hassle in the long run, and will make you look and feel like a wizard. (If you’ve got LinkedIn Learning, this guy is great, or you can also find him on YouTube.)
24 - Cr - Creativity. Creativity looks different to everyone. There are a million ways to be creative. If I find myself in a state of anxiety or despondence, usually it’s a sign that I have not been engaging my creativity, and I need to try something new, or do some art, or write something, or pull apart a bunch of shelves to reorganize.
25 - Mn - Meaning. It would be nice to know that meaning is something inherent in the universe, and lots have people have built religions that try to back this up. But ultimately, the intentions of the universe (or lack thereof) are unknowable. Meaning is something we bring to our lives.
26 - Fe - Fear. Fear is a feeling. It’s there to help us be aware of things that might be dangerous or harmful. Like every feeling, fear is a teacher. But it’s not real. It’s just a reaction. It may surprise some people who know me as bold and fearless to learn that, actually, I am afraid of lots of things, and some of them are pretty silly: Drains. Overly ripe fruit. Making phone calls. But you know what? I have cleaned drains. I have picked up and thrown away overly ripe fruit. I have made many, many phone calls. It is never any easier, I hate it every time, but I know I can do it. Be informed by your fears, but don’t let them limit you. Focus on what you want, what you care about, what’s important to you, what needs to be done. There’s a saying I like which is reported to be a Swedish proverb: Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; love more; and all good things are yours.
27 - Co - Code. We think of computer languages as being the language of computers, but that’s actually not quite true. Computer languages are the human language we use to communicate with computers. Writing code is trying to put things in terms that will be understood by the computer. A bug is never the computer’s fault because the computer never “misunderstands” your code — it just did exactly what you told it to. This should serve as a humbling reminder about the nature of communication in general. Human-to-human languages are much less exact and free from ambiguity, and it’s possible that the person with whom you’re trying to communicate is just being obtuse — but perhaps they’re just interpreting exactly the message that you conveyed, and if you want a different response, maybe you have to fix your message.
28 - Ni - Nice. It’s nice to be nice, but it’s better to be good. I took this lesson at a young age from Little Red Riding Hood in Into the Woods. If you have to pick between the two, pick good. (See #64.)
29 - Cu - Cuteness. Never underestimate the restorative power of spending 5 minutes looking at something really cute.
30 - Zn - Zucchini. Having gardens as a kid was such a lesson in what food really is, and such a rich sensory experience too. A zucchini purchased from the grocery store is noticeably different from a zucchini purchased at your local farmers’ market or grown in your own garden. You can also find vegetables at the farmers’ market, or grow things in your garden, that you will never find in a store because they just don’t scale well. If you are in a position to grow a garden, I highly recommend it. It can have weeds, and that’s ok. Not everything will grow like you expect, and that’s ok too. A garden is something over which you share custody with the earth, in a very real and immediate way, and it’s good to remember that the earth has its own ideas too.
31 - Ga - Gaps. Our information is rarely complete. Most people default to making conclusions based on the information that they have, but the most interesting ideas live in the gaps.
33 - As - Assumption. Most of our errors come from assuming something to be true which is not actually true. This is so with facts and information, with human experience, with problem-solving. The only way to combat this unfortunate tendency is to engage your curiosity. Question what you think you know. (Related: For a catalog of many incorrect things that human programmers believe, see Awesome Falsehoods.)
34 - Se - Serendipity. Lots of things are the result of a chance collision of circ*mstances that happen to work out nicely. Last year I happened to move to the Chicago area right at about the time some friends of the family were about ready to rent out an apartment. I started dating again and just so happened to meet someone who was looking for a lot of the same things I was looking for. It turned out that some work fell his way which I was in a position to help out with, which happened to put me in the way of some continuing consulting work that has been pretty cool. All along the way, I have made choices that made these serendipitous chances possible, but if I had made other choices, then other serendipitous things also might have occurred.
35 - Br - Bread. I have gone through years of bread-avoidance phases and all-the-bread phases, and here are my conclusions: (1) The best bread is made from flour and water plus yeast or sourdough starter. Maybe fermented grain mash instead of flour. Maybe soda bread instead of yeast or sourdough. But if it needs other stabilizers or texturizers or industrial-scale cheats, then it’s just not going to be very good bread. (2) Bread that’s not very good just is not worth eating. I mean that both from the perspective of taste and also metabolism. Don’t eat crappy bread. (3) You will know if the bread is very good because when you bite into it, you’ll want to exclaim, “Oh my god, that’s so good!” That’s how good bread should make you feel. Any bread that doesn’t make you feel that way is just filler. You might as well eat packing peanuts. (The starch-based biodegradable kind, obviously, not the styrofoam kind. That would be ridiculous.)
42 - Mo - Movement. Walking is good for my brain. There are thoughts and insights that I have while walking which never would occur to me while sitting in a chair. Also, being able to hold a squat to search for something in a lower cabinet, or hip-hinge to bend down while loading the dishwasher, has a huge impact on my quality of life. We are physical beings, and our bodies need movement to feel good.
45 - Rh - Rhythm. A lot of things have a natural rhythm that they want to fall into. Ups and downs, busy seasons and quiet seasons. Even individual tasks tend to have a rhythm — washing dishes or vacuuming the floor or folding laundry. Anything gets a little easier when you feel like you’ve got the rhythm of it.
50 - Sn - Sunshine. I love sunshine. I love rain, too, and then I love the sunshine even more when it comes back out again. A cozy nap on a sunny afternoon is just about the best thing in the world.
52 - Te - Tea. I love tea. In my life I have drunk enough Yorkshire Tea to float a boat. I like it brewed strong, with a little half and half and a spoonful of collagen powder. But unlike crappy bread, crappy tea is still often worth drinking, and even at American restaurants where it’s almost hopeless to get a decent cuppa, I will still order tea and make do.
53 - I - Self. Don’t get too hung up on this. It’s transient.
54 - Xe - Xenophobia. Human beings have an unfortunate tendency to fear strangers and to fear what we find strange. Some people are more prone to this than others, but none of us are immune. This is another place where curiosity is invaluable.
57 - La - Language. Language is the most malleable medium in which you can create.
59 - Pr - Prudence. It’s good to be risk-averse in ways that improve your quality of life. But it’s also prudent to take some calculated risks, or make a few bets that you can afford to lose. To never take a chance is to secure a certain return of zero.
62 - Sm - Smile. Smiling is good for your brain. Smiling with someone else is a little bit of social connection that will brighten the day for both of you. Even on terrible days, if you can find something to momentarily smile about, you can lighten the load.
63 - Eu - Eulogies. Eulogies are delivered for the benefit and comfort of the living. The dead are busy elsewhere. If you admire someone and have good things to say about them, tell them so while they’re around to hear it.
64 - Gd - Good. Good is what promotes health and pleasure and safety and happiness. Good is only good if it’s good for all of us. Kindness is rooted in good. If you can try to be anything, try to be good.
65 - Tb - Tribe. It’s good to be part of a community of people who love and look out for each other.
66 - Dy - DIY. There’s a lot to be said for having a mindset that problems are solveable and a willingness to take a stab at it.
71 - Lu - Luck. It goes both ways, but it’s easier to focus on the bad than the good. I’ve heard people say, “Nothing good ever happens to me!” and meanwhile there they are breathing clean air, well fed, standing on their own two feet under the sunshine. Do your best to shrug at bad luck, and really try to pay attention to good luck. And don’t mistake “almost bad” for bad luck. “Almost bad” is good luck! For instance, almost get hit by another car while driving in to work? How lucky that you avoided an accident! Don’t rack up “almost” misfortunes like there’s some kind of bad-luck contest running.
72 - Hf - Half-life. Things don’t last forever, but they can last a long time. What is the half life of that sorrow you hold? What is the half life of joy?
73 - Ta - Talent. Nice to have, fun to exercise, and often matters much less than you might think. Even talented people need to put in the time and the work to create something worthwhile. A lot of what looks like talent is really the persistent application of effort. If you want to be good at something, don’t bemoan your lack of talent — work on getting better.
74 - W - Whimsy. Have you ever seen a little bird hopping around on his twiggy bird feet? Or bunnies playing, or crows swooping around for sheer silly antics? Whimsy is everywhere.
75 - Re - Reminders. I don’t have a strong sense of time, so it makes my life so much easier if I set recurring reminders for things like cleaning the litter box or watering the plants. Otherwise, I quickly lose all recollection of whether I last did the thing 2 days ago or 12 days ago. I particularly appreciate that if I leave a reminder notification on my phone, it will tell me “6 hours ago” or “yesterday” or “3 days ago” so I have a visual reminder of how long I’ve been procrastinating.
85 - At - Attention. Where you place your attention is what your life is going to feel like. And I don’t just mean your sustained, directed attention. (Some of us struggle with that!) I mean, what you choose to give your attention to, what you engage with or scroll through, what you allow to shape your information and perceptions, that is going to affect what you see as the current state of the world and all that’s happening in it. If it seems like everything is terrible and there’s no hope for the world, maybe look at the media you’re in the habit of consuming and do a radical overhaul. Unsubscribe to some things, uninstall some apps, unfollow some content streams. Look for sources that seem more inspiring or hopeful, or that talk about other things you care about.
86 - Rn - Randomness. One of the unintuitive things about randomness is that it’s not evenly distributed. When you flip a coin six times, you aren’t more likely to get heads heads tails heads tails tails than you are to get heads heads heads tails tails tails or heads tails heads tails heads tails. The latter both look like patterns to us, and the first one looks like it’s more random, but really they are each equally unique sets of results that are equally unlikely.
87 - Fr - Friends. Sadly, I am a pretty inconsistent and unreliable correspondent. There are plenty of things I’ve gotten better at over the years, but that’s not one of them. Yet somehow, amazingly, I have friends who I’ve known for decades. How cool is that?
88 - Ra - Rain. I lived in Montana for four years of college and in the western desert of Colorado for another two years, through the smoke of some pretty gnarly fire seasons. It forever changed the way I think about the rain. I am always grateful for it.
89 - Ac - Anchoring. When I was a kid and all the way through college, I didn’t have a lot of spending money. Twenty bucks was a lot of money, and I would think very carefully about whether to blow it on a shirt. Then after college, I started working at a fine jeweler where the typical purchase was several hundred dollars, and where we regularly made sales of multiple thousands of dollars. My budget wasn’t a whole lot different than it had ever been, but suddenly twenty bucks seemed like no big deal. There’s a family saying my mom passed down to us, “A thing is worth what it’s worth to you,” and I believe that wholeheartedly. I would only add the footnote that money is imaginary. Try to anchor your ideas of value on what has value to you, not arbitrary numbers.
90 - Th - Things. When you’re starting out in adulthood, it’s easy to get in the habit of acquiring. And then at some point once you’ve been living in the same place for a while, you might start to notice that the things are starting to pile up. And they’re good things, they’re useful things, not that you’re using them, but you still might! Meanwhile the things keep coming, in Amazon boxes and gift-wrapped as presents and from parents who are cleaning out their garage or moving to a new place, saying, “You always liked these things, you want them?” or “These are things I kept for you.” And at some point every nook and cranny of your home is crammed with things, and you find yourself saying things like, “If only we had a little more space…” But you don’t need more space. You need fewer things.
98 - Cf - Coffee. Coffee is such a cultural touchstone and such an important part of the lives of so many people I know that I will suggest “meeting up for coffee” or “grabbing a coffee” even though I don’t actually drink coffee. I’d also love to run a coffee house, again: even though I don’t drink coffee. Isn’t that peculiar?
102 - No - Notifications. I will ignore notifications on my phone in proportion to how many of them I get, so I am ruthless in turning off notifications for things that do not add to my quality of life. I also limit the apps on my home screen to those that I use regularly and that don’t stress me out. And about quarterly, I audit my apps and delete anything that I no longer use (or that I downloaded thinking I might use it, then never really did).
114 - Fl - Finality. This is something I learned as a lawyer: litigation is, above all, a system for resolving disputes with finality. Also ideally with fairness, also ideally in the interests of equity and justice, but actually you can’t always serve those things. Sometimes an injustice is irremediable. Sometimes one party really was done wrong by the other party, but the remedy is constrained by contract or by law. Sometimes both parties suck and are blameworthy in a multitude of ways. The law can’t always deliver fairness, but even so, it can try to deliver finality. (I also know that anyone who has ever been stuck in protracted litigation is likely to find the idea that “litigation is a system for resolving disputes with finality” to be utterly laughable. Sorry.)
115 - Mc - Melancholy. Sometimes I struggle with depressive tendencies. If you are someone who does not experience depression, you might ask the question, “About what?” but that’s not what depression is. You’re not depressed about something, or over something, or because of something — except maybe because of brain chemistry. If you are someone who struggles with depression, it’s important to know that this is a thing that happens to you, and that it’s not “truth” or permanent or anyone’s fault. And while there’s a lot of well-meaning wellness advice out there, depression doesn’t magically resolve itself if you eat the right diet or exercise the right amount or start meditating or engage in the right uplifting community activities. All of those things are good for you, and anything that is good for you will be more helpful than unhelpful. Conversely, things that are not-so-good for you will not somehow become helpful because you’re depressed, like eating donuts or binge-watching every past episode of favorite TV shows. But really, what’s most likely to help is time, and maybe medication. (Or, you could be dealing with sh*tty external circ*mstances that are creating a state of stress which is making you vulnerable to depression, in which case removal of those sh*tty circ*mstances will also help. If you can’t do anything about the sh*tty circ*mstances, then definitely consider medication. Your situation isn’t going to be improved by adding unmanaged depression into the mix.)
116 - Lv - Love. Love is the most important thing that human beings have to give. And mostly the way we experience love is in the giving. If you can’t stand other people, then love animals, or love trees and rocks and rivers. But most people have people they love. Show ‘em. Also, this might sound a little peculiar, but do your best to let go of worrying about being loved by others. Other people love you! Whoever you are reading this, I am sure that’s true. For starters, I love you (even if I don’t know you in real life, I love you for reading this!), so I know other people must too. Worrying about receiving love is a trap. It’s like counting birthday presents. Is what matters here really how many birthday presents you got? No! Do other people owe you birthday presents? No! Might other people value you and care for you in ways not expressed in the form of a birthday present? Yes! So let go of worrying about how many birthday presents you got. Let go of worrying about whether or how much other people love you, or how they’re expressing it. Accept other people for who they are and how they express themselves, and P in how you love others.
Whew! I know that was a long one, and I’ve still got about half the periodic table to fill in. What do you think? Any suggestions for some of the remaining blanks?
