The boldness and cheer of my children. The life I am able to live. The joy of service when I can find it. The inescapable wonder of the world.

I am lucky beyond belief.

When a miracle happens, we often try to recreate it. We try to find a way to capture that magic, to turn it into a renewable resource. We create endless film spinoffs of successful single movies. We try to re-tell a joke, seeking the same laughs. We live in our glory days, never realizing we’re robbing of them of their glory.

But you can recreate magic – just not exactly the same magic. You have all the ingredients, because they were all you, all us. Embracing life, being creative and present, allowing the space for miracles; these are the ingredients for bottled lightning. It won’t be the same film, the same joke, the same glory. But it will be just as amazing, if not more, if you simply embrace the idea that it can be.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your children is also a massive investment in your own future. Give your kids the gift of solid bonds with other children.

If you’re lucky enough for them to have cousins, do everything you can to engineer time together, including changing your own life to be closer to them. If they don’t have cousins, make sure you’re making it a priority to support their friendships. Dedicate time, give rides, invite the kids over to dinner. Do it all. Few things are more important.

The bonds your children make will in turn make your children stronger. They’ll be smarter, more resilient, more social, and better able to handle life. That not only means you’ll be directly supporting them for a shorter period of time as they launch their own adulthoods more successfully, but it means your own bond with them is likely to stay strong as you yourself age. That’s a good thing to look forward to.

Lots of people spend more time in fiction than in real life. Especially if your real life is relatively similar day to day, but you’re a voracious consumer of books, movies, etc. And this can give you a skewed sense that real life should – or even does – mirror the tropes used in narrative storytelling.

It doesn’t.

There aren’t convenient character archetypes. Things aren’t evenly spread. They don’t always wrap up neatly. There isn’t always an answer.

Real life is joyous. So is fiction. But one isn’t the other.

The most cared-for and valued things aren’t the shiniest. They’re the ones with the most patches.

If you see a road with many different patches of asphalt, that means the road is well taken care of. Asphalt decays over time; that’s not a fault of the material, it’s just a truth of most things. To keep the road operational, you need to constantly be filling in those gaps and holes. The result won’t always look pretty, but it will be strong. If you don’t, the cracks will widen, and it will eventually stop being a road.

A brand-new road looks good, but it hasn’t been tested yet. You don’t know if people will put in the effort to maintain it yet. So don’t be fooled.

If you love something, that means you value it enough to repair its damage, again and again. Things get damaged, and that doesn’t mean they aren’t good. Patch those spots, and show your love.

No matter how good or bad something is, people can still think it’s worse or better than it is. Knowing that, find the people who are wrong in the right ways, and be friends with them. No one is objectively correct about anything – but being wrong together is fun.

My house is currently full of guests, people who have traveled a great distance to gather together for a weekend of fun. What a joy this is! What a point of pride to have a comfortable home with many pillows and blankets, no shortage of space and food and wine for those that travel. I am blessed to have such wonder under my roof!

Be frugal with yourself, and generous with others. Very few objects pay you back more happiness than the effort you spent earning the money to buy them, but friends pay you back tenfold more happiness than you spent.

Have you ever heard of “The Ultimatum Game?” It goes like this: You get a thousand bucks, but it comes with a condition. The condition is that you have to offer some amount of the money to a stranger. The stranger knows you started with a thousand bucks, and also knows the rest of the rules (as do you) – once you make an offer, there is zero negotiation or haggling. The stranger just gets to say yes or no. If they say yes, the split happens. If they say no, then neither of you gets any money. Zero dollars for both of you. In either case, you part ways and never see each other again.

How much would you offer that stranger? Think of a number.

Now, imagine being the stranger. Would you say yes to the amount you just proposed, or would you burn the whole deal?

There is a really funny trick about human psychology here, and if you can figure it out and then purge it from your own mind, you will make your life incredibly better from this point forward. Here it is: If you offer the stranger 1 dollar (so you keep $999), then the stranger, if they were perfectly rational, would say yes.

But you can’t imagine them doing that, can you? You certainly wouldn’t. You’d be so insulted you’d trash the whole deal. After all, that greedy jerk tried to lowball you!

But here’s the reality: If you ignore all the emotional elements, you have a simple choice. Do you want a dollar, or do you want nothing? A dollar is clearly preferable – yet virtually everyone would rather punish the greedy person, even if it came at their own expense.

Even now you hate this. You’re trying to come up with all sorts of rationalizations for why you shouldn’t take an unfair offer. But that’s because you’re projecting other circumstances onto the choice – you’re using your sense of unfairness as if you were being offered low wages for honest work, or an unfair split of money you earned together. But none of that is true! You’re being offered a tiny windfall, or nothing – and you paid nothing for the choice. So the tiny windfall is better!

We do exactly that all the time. We burn offers that benefit us simply because we think someone else is screwing us over. But how is being offered a free dollar a screw-job? You can’t compare your potential gains to hypothetical amounts that were never on the table. Because if you do, you’ll constantly cost yourself money.

Don’t concern yourself with what anyone else is getting. Just take the best option for yourself each time you can. Otherwise, you’re getting screwed – by you.

Sometimes, traditions or institutions endure because they’re working. They must be doing something right, or they’d have perished long ago, right?

Haha. Most of the time, traditions or institutions persist because they’ve learned to protect themselves. Very few things more than a hundred years old would look like they do if we designed them now, from the ground up. K-12 education comes to mind, but there are countless other examples.

You probably can’t change most of them. But opt out and find alternatives that actually fit you, when you can.