A year of collecting things from the day
15 of my favourites
The best writing advice I’ve stumbled across came from Walt Whitman:
“The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment—to put things down without deliberation—without worrying about their style—without waiting for a fit time or place.”
For a long while, I kept a haphazard practice of writing into the gush. I’d dash off little notes to myself in my phone, or scribble things in the back pages of my diary.
Then, a year ago, I decided to experiment with a more deliberate practice. I collected the things I encountered each day and shared them with my paid newsletter subscribers each week.
Compiling these sometimes intimate, sometimes mundane, and sometimes insightful jottings soon became the favourite aspect of my week. The personal notes have fuelled ideas for my longer essays, and the practice has nudged me to notice the moments I feel most alive each day.
When I get a chance to speak to subscribers, they often tell me it’s their favourite thing in their inbox each week, offering a moment to reflect, learn and reevaluate. For some, it acts as almost as a reverse oracle. As the lovely reader Kassondra Cloos told me:
“It’s often exactly what you need to hear when you need to hear it, like the little scripts in fortune cookies! I always look forward to opening the Sunday email and discovering what I’m going to move forward from. I just love it.”
My plan is to continue sharing these tidbits from the day every Sunday in my Weekly Things newsletter. If you’re not already receiving the bonus issue and would like to, simply upgrade your subscription to the newsletter.
Sometimes it feels as if there is nothing to be found in a day. Sometimes it feels like nothing is really accomplished in a day. But this small, ordinary practice transformed such days and taught me there is always something, however small, to notice and gush over.
So to mark a year of this practice of noticing and sharing, I’ve selected some of my favourites. I hope you’ll join me in another year of noticing moments of aliveness ❤️
15 of my favourite things from the day
1.
23 March | Why do I get so caught up in wondering if something will work out, when the worst-case scenario is something I can handle?
2.
25 March | I’m having breakfast with a lover and he asks if I’ve ever peeled a boiled egg with a spoon. I say no, and he kindly demonstrates. The peel falls away swiftly and neatly and I wonder how I never knew such a simple thing, and how years from now I’ll be peeling a boiled egg with a spoon and think of him and how lovely it is to carry with us these intimate intricacies of the people we meet.
3.
16 April | When someone’s behaviour is frustrating, irritating or rude, I’m trying to remind myself, “This human is simple trying to get comfortable in this world, as I am too.”
4.
2 May | I’m playing a game of solitaire and I think about how I must have seen my grandfather play at the kitchen table a hundred times. From the living room, I’d hear the shuffle of the cards in the background and sometimes catch a glimpse of them suspended mid-air like an accordion. How did he get them to spring between his hands like that? And why did I never think to ask?
5.
8 May | Each year when the wisteria starts blooming, I’m overcome with a feeling of longing. I want to catch each glorious drooping bundle and somehow gobble the lot, and at the same time preserve the flowers in their full magnificence forever.
Further pondering: On making the most of things
6.
4 June | I tell my friend Georgia I’m experimenting with the three-no challenge, and she says, “If you can hold the possibility of rejection lightly, it opens up so much. Doesn’t it?”
7.
27 June | Be yourself is rather unspecific advice when we contain multitudes.
8.
11 July | I think when someone says, “If you’d have told me a year ago that this would be my life, I wouldn’t have believed you” it might be my favourite utterance, ever. It’s plump with possibility and surprise. Delight replaces dread. It’s the juicy stuff of realising things can turn around in an instant, even without knowing how.
9.
27 July | There are occasions when “no one cares” can leave you in despair, and occasions when it frees you.
10.
31 July | Don’t think about how to fix your life, think about how to move your life.
Further pondering: What thing feels most alive?
11.
15 August | I met a new friend for lunch so he could lend me a book—and he ends up lending me four. He hands each dog-eared copy along with the permission to underscore whatever moves me in a different coloured pen. Then he hands me a fifth, and says it’s one for me to keep. He’d overheard I hadn’t read The Little Prince, and gift inscription said: “I hope it brings you joy, reflection and a touch of magic”. It's a gesture so familiar, even in its complete novelty. I recall the list of offhand things people close to me say they want, so later I can get them as gifts. Maybe that’s what this new friend meant when he said, “In love, we are often loving an aspect of ourselves and loving the reflection.” And I’ve been wondering if that means the more we find to love in ourselves, the more we find to love in everything?
12
19 August | I keep telling people I’m in a daytime season of my life—early dinners, early nights, early mornings, lunches, sunlight, running, tea, teetotaling—and enjoying it immensely.
Further pondering: Things to enjoy about a daytime season
13.
4 January | We’re sharing half a watermelon and pass a spoon back and forth to take scoops, when I say rather frivolously I don’t like the seeds. A moment later he passes me a spoonful of the pink flesh, perfectly seedless, and then continues to scoop another, and another, and I think how the things that make you feel cared for are so small.
14.
5 February | Are you making a decision based on what you think you’ll lose, or what you think you’ll gain?
Further pondering: On deciding between things
15.
13 March | While watching the gorgeous film Perfect Days at the cinema, I regretted not getting a choc top. So I got one afterwards and ate it at the bus stop, remembering that what you want and when you want it doesn’t have to be so confined.
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"I keep telling people I’m in a daytime season of my life—early dinners, early nights, early mornings, lunches, sunlight, running, tea, teetotaling—and enjoying it immensely." - scratch the running, and I'm fully in my daytime season of life as well.
„the more we find to love in ourselves, the more we find to love in everything?“ - Word. You can put an exclamation mark there, because when there’s love in our hearts we’re more in tune with love in our surroundings. It’s like a song you adore. You‘ll smile when you hear it even when the bad song is louder.