Things to read
Advice for self-sabotage from Ask Polly (complement with this Instagram post from Ingrid Fetell Lee with dozens of insightful strategies in the comments)
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” — an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot via
How to apologise from The Marginalia with poetry from Ellen Bass:
“It’s permitted
to receive solace for whatever you did
or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful
human.”Tips for surviving a stressful holiday season from
ICYMI: The ups and downs of doing the thing (my pre-launch jitters diary in the previous edition of Weekly Things!)
A thing to listen to
The debut episode of my new podcast
asks: how do we start improving our social lives?Things on unwinding
I’ve been publishing a weekly column on ABC Everyday exploring simple ways people unwind and take care of themselves. Here’s some recent highlights:
“I think people love to help, but we often forget to ask” — Hannah Moloney shares how she gets through busy periods with meal trains and community
“I might set aside 10 minutes to think about my ‘dream day’, and then consider what achievable action I can do” — Chris Cheers shares a strategy fro overwhelm
Something to try
Turn your phone grayscale — my screen time has skyrocketed recently, and so I scrolled through the internet for a solution and was reminded of the grayscale shortcut. It has varying levels of success for people, but coupled with deleting Instagram, Safari (!), TikTok and Reddit, it’s helped to make my phone feel refreshingly dull.
A thing to ponder
Reading
by A. R. Ammons
It's nice
after dinner
to walk down to
the beach
and find
the biggest
thing on earth
relatively calm.