Finding a more forgiving medium:

Blogging is very forgiving in many ways. I hadn’t thought about both blogging and writing from this angle but it’s an interesting idea. It reminds me of the idea of making habits easier to do (especially at the start) in order to keep them up and have any chance of actually making them true habits.

The ability to “move it around for a long time” is what I’m looking for in a writing medium — I want words and images to be movable, I want to switch them out, copy and cut and paste them, let them mutate. 

But most importantly, I want to be able to be wrong. I want to change my mind! I want to evolve. 

I guess any medium can be forgiving if you can do the (extremely) difficult task of not caring about what others think.

Read Blogging as a forgiving medium from austinkleon.com

One of my favorite book excerpts of of recent memory (emphasis mine):

“I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.” (Ray Dalio, Principles)

The first and final frames:

This was fun to watch. I wonder if there is a similar thing for books (i.e. first and final lines)? 🤔

Music that I have been listening to over the past couple of months:

How to master anything:

Nothing earth-shatteringly new here but the points are good (for me) to revisit and think about, so it is worth a watch.

One way I think about this is, if I’m going to become excellent at anything, I need to fail 1000 times, and the faster I can get those 1000 failures out of the way, the sooner I will start experiencing success.

I am almost at 200 posts on this blog. Still got a long way to go. 🤣

The crazy scale of our universe:

This is the most fun I have had in a while. I got lost in this on Friday night and spent waaaaay to much time reading the and then getting the app (Universe in a nutshell) and playing around. It is fantastic.

Read The big and the small on waitbutwhy.com

(Note that this is very similar to something I shared in WILLW #99)

Cool visualization of how plants like to move:

This is just so damn relaxing to watch.

Ways to sign-off on your emails or letters:

There are so many good ones here. Some faves below to wet your appetite:

Swerve soft,

Zoom out,

Tust your senses,

In alchemy,

Just washed my hands,

Read 100 Good Sign-offs on are.na/meg-miller

Other things I was reminded of, or thankful for, last week:

• Spring is on the horizon and it’s nice to have that feeling in the air (and a little light in the mornings)
• Didn’t think I would have a trampoline in the yard but I’m really grateful that my wife got a second-hand one. Something to keep the kids occupied and tired (and out of the house).

• Also didn’t think we would have become as into gardening as we have but this week we started building some raised beds for veggie gardens (another DIY project). Grateful that we have that to work on at the moment.
• In the art studio this week – painted the river by the field out back, the kids and I started working with some water-soluble crayons, and they did their own work with them as well. All turned out pretty good I think. Pics below: