The woods are calling me. I can hear it. Camping season is just about here.

Some day in the not-too-distant future, I’ll go and never come back. I don’t want to truly be a “mountain man” or anything; I have no desire to leave civilization entirely. I just want to be a little farther away from it than I am now.

Small barriers are the key to healthy habits. I have a pretty healthy diet; I don’t completely avoid junk or unhealthy foods, but I only keep healthy things in the house. If I want something outside of that, I have to go out and get it. I’m obviously capable of doing that, but the additional barrier keeps me from doing it too often. It keeps it a “treat” instead of just a default.

Your social media apps are like that. I don’t keep those apps on my phone – if I want to check a social media account, I have to either go to my computer, or I have to use my phone’s internet browser and log into the site. That’s a pain, so I don’t do it too often. It’s not never, but it’s not automatic.

That’s how I want civilization. I want it accessible, but inconvenient. I don’t want to live hundreds of miles from the nearest city or deeply suburban area – but I want to live maybe 40 miles from it. Close enough to visit when I want to, far enough away that it ceases to be the default lifestyle. Something I have to consciously choose to do on a case-by-case basis instead of the environment that takes over my life.

Right now, the grass is still greener on this side. There are still too many advantages, especially with three young children, of living my suburban lifestyle. Proximity to family members and modern conveniences and ease of maintaining my home all win out over the majesty of the forest… for now. So for now, the roles are reversed: the forest is what I keep close so that I can visit it, and the city is my home. But not forever.

There are lots of reasons why you should take the initiative and do things before anyone asks you to do them. One of those reasons is, of course, that taking the initiative looks good – but that’s far from the only reason.

If you decide to pitch a project rather than waiting for an assignment, you have a lot more control over what you do. When you get assigned something, you have almost none.

When someone asks for something, they spend the entire time between when they asked and when you deliver thinking about the ideal version they could get, and you’re actual version has to compete with that. When you pitch something, you are the ideal version.

When you pitch something, the only outcomes are “they love it; you move forward” or “they don’t love it, but you’re no worse off and even maybe still a little better for showing moxie.” If you have an assignment, completing it well is mostly just treading water, and messing it up can set you way back in terms of social capital and reputation.

Don’t wait for life to give you homework assignments. Decide what you want to do.

Idle time is a hole in my soul. I am envious of people who can take advantage of “free time” in a healthy way, but that’s never been me.

Free time, for me, tends to immediately get filled by unhealthy things. If I find myself unexpectedly having a scheduled thing delayed by an hour and I have to wait, for instance, all the things that naturally occur to me to do in that hour are unhealthy. I’ll doom-scroll social media, I’ll eat an unhealthy snack, I’ll bug someone who’s busy, buy a thing I don’t need, etc. These are things I don’t ever do when I’m planning – but they’re what happens when my plans get disrupted.

So why can’t I just fill unexpected time with something productive? I overthink it, primarily. For instance: very rarely do plans get delayed in such a way that lets me know exactly the length of the delay. Sometimes people text and say “I’ll be an hour late,” but more often that text says “I’m running late, be there as soon as I can.” That means I don’t know if I have time to squeeze in an extra workout or get some writing done. I hate starting things and not finishing them.

The reality is that I need the rigidity of a packed schedule in order to not be slothful. I’m pretty good on the other six deadly sins, but that one haunts me. I’m terrified of being slothful, lazy, idle. I think it might be the most dangerous of the seven, because it’s so sticky. It actually takes a lot of effort to maintain wrath all the time! But sloth? That takes no effort at all.

So I fight against it by always giving myself planned things that need to be done. I don’t trust my instincts; given free reign to “do whatever I feel like,” the choices my id makes always chase short-term satisfaction instead of long-term health. I feel as though the best way for me to never do unhealthy things is to never have time to do them; to always be doing so many healthy things that there’s no room for anything else.

Then, when time to do something else is thrust upon me unexpectedly by the random chaos of daily life, I don’t have a healthy thing to fill it with. The obvious solution would seem to be to keep a list of “Healthy Things to Do in Case of Emergency,” but the question is – if those things are good and healthy to do, why would I only do them in case of emergency? Shouldn’t I be doing those things all the time, and not just in case of an unexpected wait?

As is often the case, writing this out has given me a thought. There is one particularly healthy outlet that is easy, can be done at any duration, and while it’s something that I do normally it still has plenty of marginal utility for extra time spent on it – reading. Reading also has the benefit of relaxing me, whereas waiting is generally pretty anxiety-driving for me. If idle time is a wound, my beloved kindle may just be the first-aid kit I’m looking for.

So I’ll make a habit of keeping my kindle more accessible (right now it resides in a specific “reading nook” in my home, but having it a little more on-hand may be the key) and take it with me when I leave the house more often. Make it easier to make something healthy the default. If you’re the kind of person whose instincts are tuned towards healthy choices, bless you. If you aren’t, all is not lost – the fight for your own physical, mental and spiritual health is one you can win, no matter where you started.

When you’re deliberating over a big decision, how often are you really doing that – versus justifying the snap decision you already made?

We all do it, so don’t feel overly flawed or bad. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fight against that impulse.

Step One: Know when to trust your gut. By process of elimination, don’t trust it any other time. Make a mental list of all of your highly specific areas of expertise. Don’t make the mistake of assuming any knowledge or expertise transfer into any other realms. If you’re a brilliant cardiologist, then you can trust your gut about someone’s irregular heartbeat. That doesn’t mean you can trust your gut about someone’s skin condition, let alone about macroeconomics, personal relationships, or real estate. There’s no such thing as general brilliance.

(Don’t believe me? Go look up some things Albert Einstein said on matters besides physics.)

Step Two: If you’re in one of the 99.99% of realms where your gut instinct is biased to the point of garbage, listen to it anyway. Don’t act on it, but listen. Write down what you think your decision should be.

Step Three: Feed all the “little demons” of bias. Wait three days. Sleep. Get exercise. Eat well. Relax and make sure you’re not mad about something unrelated. Get a hug or six. Go outside. Take your vitamins. After three days of doing that, come back and look at your decision that you wrote down (but didn’t act on yet). And hey, if this seems like way too much trouble – then the decision can’t be that important, can it?

Step Four: In a good and healthy mental state, use all of your formidable mental powers to convince yourself of the opposite course of action from what you wrote down. Assume you were as wrong as possible initially. You got it exactly, 180-degrees backwards. Spend hours researching the opposite case. Become an expert on the other view. Again, if this is too much trouble – then accept that the decision wasn’t that consequential.

Step Five: Act. By this point, you may not be right but you’re not getting any righter. Do what you have to, and be ready to learn from whatever happens.

If you won’t give the major decisions in your life this treatment, then you’ve yielded control of your life to your impulses and biases. Good luck.

You should care, to some extent, about things that happened. You should care a lot less about things people said. And you should care almost not at all about things people said about things people said.

What are you mad about right now? Is it that someone said something about something that someone else said about the opinion of a third person? And is that opinion not even on a thing that happened, but on something said by yet another person?

Too many “saids.” Keep yourself away from that. Just do, and be done.

When you’re tired, low, stressed or upset, you’re still capable of a great many things. Unfortunately, something you’re rarely capable of in those instances is figuring out what you’re capable of. So instead, those days tend to just knock people out – you think you aren’t capable of anything because you can’t think of anything specific you’re capable of, so you just mulligan the whole day.

The next time you have a decent-to-good day, try this exercise: make a map of your own capabilities on the low days. Write out some clear, short instructions for yourself. Say, “These are the small but impactful things that I know I can do even on my worst days. If I have a bad day, I can do just these things and then that day will be a success, and I can step back from the rest without added guilt.”

Some days all you can do is water the plants, eat a healthy meal, and check your email. But it’s still better to do those things than not to do them. At the very least, you won’t be as mad at yourself the next day, and feeling guilty and angry at yourself is rarely productive.

You don’t have to be unrealistic and expect that you’ll be equally capable on every single day of your life. But a little bit is so so so much better than nothing, so give yourself a way to do a little bit, even on the worst days.

Take a small, plain input and turn it into something beautiful in a single sitting with your own skill and effort.

That’s a solid recipe for satisfaction. It doesn’t matter if it’s literally a paper crane. It could be a delicious meal, a knitted hat, a birdhouse. Something that doesn’t have to be permanent – in fact, it’s often fantastic if it isn’t. Just meant to serve its purpose for a while.

Its real purpose, of course, was to center you in a way that lets you carry more joy into the world. I recommend it.

This is advice that I was once given, and have in turn given it to other people: “Set yourself a cutoff point for your workday that you absolutely won’t work past. That way, you’ll work more intensely before that cutoff because you know it’s there, and after the cutoff you’ll be able to have your personal time.” Today I happened to share that advice in a meeting with many of my colleagues.

I’ve always thought of that as very good advice, and when I give it to other people I’m doing so from a place of encouragement, trying to help them have healthier harmony between work and non-work. But one of my colleagues, who heads a different department, really gave me pause with her response. She said: “But that’s not how I work well and achieve low stress. I like to work during the day, then do some yoga, then log back in and work a little more, then have happy hour on Friday, then check some emails over the weekend, etc. That’s the workflow that keeps me enjoying my work and not stressed out about it. Everyone’s best structure for balancing their lives looks different.” (Paraphrased a little, perhaps, but that was the gist.)

How right she was! I still think my initial advice was very good – for me. And maybe for some people like me! But it’s absurd to think that there’s a right way to harmonize the different pressures in your life. They’re not all equal across people, and certainly our inner responses aren’t equal, either.

That’s not to say that all approaches are equally good, of course! For any given individual, there are definitely unhealthy structures and habits to avoid. But across many individuals there will be many different things that work and don’t, and that’s a good thing for me to remember.

Maybe for you to remember, too.

A man once carved a very heavy stone into a very beautiful statue. He took great pride in his work and enjoyed how the accomplishment made him feel. His community gathered around and praised him for his work. One person even pointed out that the statue was so well-crafted that even its shadow was beautiful.

There was another man, jealous of the first. He was not jealous of the statue, for he had no appreciation of art nor did he find virtue in work. But he was deeply envious of the esteem of the community.

The deepest cries of his heart’s envy reached dark places, and soon a demon appeared before the jealous man. He made him an offer: “I will give you a shadow that appears just as beautiful as the shadow of the statue, and I shall cast it in front of your home where all may see. Though you will have no statue, your peers will see the shadow and imagine that you do, and will praise you thusly. All I ask in exchange is that any time you would spend building in the future, you instead spend in service to me.”

The jealous man, who had no intention of ever putting in the work to build anything anyway, marveled at his good fortune and agreed instantly. True to his word, a splendid shadow stretched out before the man’s home as if a most glorious statue were hidden just around the hedge. And the people did indeed come and praised the jealous man, for they thought he must be a sculptor of great measure himself.

Soon, people began to ask if they could see the statue itself that would cast such a beautiful shadow, but of course the jealous man would not allow them inside his garden. The more people wanted to see, the more he had to keep them away, until soon he was friendless and isolated for fear that his secret would be discovered. The people from his community gave one last appeal: “Allow us in to see the statue itself on tomorrow’s first light or we shall not care for you again, for we tire of looking only at a shadow.”

Desperate to retain their esteem, the jealous man worked furiously all through the night to try to create a statue that would equal the shadow. But not only did he have none of the ability needed, every piece of stone he attempted to gather simply vanished, for he had already promised his labor to the demon, who had not forgotten.

In the morning, the jealous man was weeping alone in his garden when he was visited by the true sculptor. “Turn away,” yelled the jealous man. “Be gone from here!”

“I already know your secret,” said the sculptor. “I knew it from the first day.”

“How,” demanded the jealous man. “How could you know? The shadow was as beautiful as yours!”

“A true craftsman knows the difference between the statue and the shadow. Eventually all people come to understand it.”

“It isn’t fair,” cried the jealous man. “I have traded away years of my future for a shadow, and you got everything overnight.”

The sculptor laughed. “Overnight? I labored for years to move the stone, years more to carve it, and years before that to learn my craft. You simply weren’t paying attention yet, because work did not impress you, only the result of work. And so you tried to bargain for the result without the work, but one cannot chase both the statue and the shadow. We both gave years of our lives, but I gave them to my own future self, and you gave them away to a demon so that people would think more of you than is deserved. And now you chase those very people away so they don’t discover your fraud.” And the sculptor walked away, leaving the jealous man with nothing of substance, a slave forevermore to his bargain.

A statue will cast a shadow, but a shadow will not a statue make.

Our communities have become very intentional. We talk to who we want to talk to, listen to who we want to listen to, identify with who we want to identify with. Geography isn’t as huge of an influence as it once was (although certainly it still has some impact). But geography is still a binder – you can create communities of choice through technology all you want, but you still live with your neighbors. I wonder how long it will be before geography stops being the controlling factor? How long before technology makes travel, communication and construction all so easy that people could live anywhere they want and still visit anywhere else easily and communicate effortlessly? Until the echo chamber becomes a literal one?

I like being forced by circumstance to talk to just, you know, people. It’s healthy to mix it up.