You should mark the things you love, whether or not you’ll always love them.

If you love apples, go ahead and plant an apple tree. “But what if I don’t still love apples in ten years?” So what? You will always have loved them when you planted the tree, and we don’t need things to be permanent in order to celebrate them.

Language is a wonderful thing. Using the power of language, mankind has been to space. We’ve built incredible civilizations and wonderful art. I love language!

But now and then, it’s helpful to remember that language, and the civilization it carries, puts layers and layers of occlusion over fundamental truths.

We so often follow the words, and we stop looking at anything else. Want a real trip? Watch a foreign language film – or even better, TV show. Don’t put the subtitles on. Let yourself be totally lost in terms of words, but leave yourself every other element. The visuals, the tone of voice, the setting. Let your gut instincts tell you what’s going on.

You won’t pick up every nuance. But you’ll notice things you never did before. You may not know what the bad guy did, but you’ll know who the bad guy is, for sure. If it’s a secret, you’ll probably figure it out before someone who understands the words!

Go to a part of the world where you can’t understand what’s being said, and just observe. You’ll see who leads social groups, you’ll see who’s in love, you’ll see all sorts of things that the words hid from you.

Keep that observation sharp. Even with the words, those are helpful skills.

My father admired anyone who would sacrifice for freedom, and anyone who would defend others. May you always have the spirit of rebellion within your heart, planted next to your compassion for all humanity.

The littlest thing becomes the biggest thing in the world when you’re experiencing it uniquely for the first time.

Are flowers a big thing? Objectively no – but if no one has ever surprised you with flowers before, it might be the thing that makes your whole month.

A text from a friend telling me how much they enjoy spending time with me, a partner going out of their way to bake me something from scratch, a child’s trophy for their best dad ever.

These are my moon landings.

Today I discovered that an app I’d been using to order from a restaurant for years was accumulating rewards points the whole time. Suffice to say we had a feast with numerous neighborhood kiddos and it didn’t cost me a dime.

Earlier today, something I wrote on this blog years ago became a helpful tool to communicate an idea; it was better, in fact, than the way I was trying to phrase it before doing a quick search of the archives.

What other secret treasures do we leave in our wake, waiting for the day they become just the thing we need?

Happy New Month!

My resolution in July is almost always some variation of “be more free.” Here’s the most important thing about freedom to remember: It requires work.

You (should) start learning this at a young age. Don’t like the food your parents cook you? Cook your own. The rules in their house becoming stifling? Move out.

Hard work and personal responsibility are the price you pay for the freedom to live the life you want. I will aim to remember this myself, and for my resolution, I’m going to give my children all more opportunities to be more free in exchange for some added personal responsibilities. They’ve always stepped up when I’ve done this before, so I’m excited to do it again.

Be more free, my friends!

There is a vast machine out there that feeds on your rage. A long time ago, the various people who profit from the machine made it immune to being raged against by figuring out how to make vitriol the very fuel that powers it.

This machine exists to make you angry, because you being angry at it makes it more powerful. It then has the power to make you even angrier, growing ever mightier with each spike in your blood pressure.

Do you remember the advice in the earliest days of the internet, “don’t feed the trolls?” The wiser among us recognized that some people got pleasure out of baiting you into arguments and getting under your skin. The only winning move was not to play; ignore, block, and move on with your life.

Well, the trolls are behind the wheel, now. Entertainment and politics alike thrive exclusively on your attention, and the most reliable attention is angry attention. So the machine has learned to make you angry, not as a side effect, but as the main objective. This means you cannot ever win. You can’t ever beat the machine, because it feeds on your very attempts. It isn’t a person that can be intimidated, reasoned with, or overpowered. Your anger does nothing but spin the flywheel, and that’s why it spends so much of its power directly trying to make you angry.

Don’t feed the trolls, and don’t feed the machine. Whenever you get angry about anything that isn’t within your arm’s reach, remember that your anger is worse than impotent. It’s actually feeding the thing you hate.

Ignore, block, and move on with your life.

Sometimes, the primary goal of an interaction is to get to a “no” quickly and decisively.

People have all sorts of reasons not to tell you “no,” even when they know they’ll never say “yes.” An employer that doesn’t want to promote you still wants you to think it’s in the cards. A potential mate with multiple suitors who hasn’t decided yet between them still wants them all to be options.

Most people know when they’re in this situation, but they don’t like to admit it. They want to stay in the orbit, thinking that if they push too hard, that might be the thing that turns a potential yes into a no.

It isn’t.

The no was always there, and what you’re doing is simply harming yourself. Without the firm “no,” you can’t move on or take better options. Respect your time and yourself more than that – get the firm answer, either way. The universe isn’t different, but you are.

It takes more effort to start a project than to do it.

Once I’m at the sink washing dishes, it takes the same effort to wash two as to wash twenty. The momentum carries you forward and the repetition can be done mostly automatically. It’s the shift into “wash dishes mode” that takes the most cognitive effort.

(This is one of the reasons I prefer a smaller number of longer workdays, too! Any day that has work in it is a “work day,” regardless of length. A ten-hour day doesn’t feel different to me than an eight-hour one, but an extra day off is great!)

So do things as you go. Wash one dish on your way through the kitchen. If that’s all you do – hey, you’re one dish cleaner. But chances are you’ll find that once you’re over the initial hump, those dishes (or laundry, or emails, or whatever) will fly by once you’re in the mode. And the mode is easier to switch to if your initial cognitive commitment is just one unit.

Sometimes we feel so bad that we don’t even want to use the ladders we have available to get better. We’re too low to climb, even though climbing is what we need.

So don’t climb. Just rest against the ladder. Do the smallest thing. Sit on the bottom rung. When that little bit of energy comes, sit on the next one up.

You won’t stay low forever.