This is an easy one. My ideal day is one where I have no obligations. I don’t have a to-do list, I don’t have to work, I am not required to be anywhere or remember anything or do anything.
On a day like that, I’d want to wake to clear skies and welcoming temperatures, and I’d take my coffee with the outdoor scenery. A fresh croissant would also be nice, or some sort of flaky pastry.
Beyond that, there are a million things I might do! Garden, watch butterflies, read, sail, paddleboard, walk a new city, surf, hike, sit in an outdoor cafe and watch people. Be on or near a beach. Listen to waves. Watch birds. Explore someplace new.
In my ideal day, something delightful will surprise me. I’ll laugh a lot. I’ll love my people and they’ll love me. I’ll eat good food and savor it. In summer I’ll sit outside in the evening and watch the sunset. In winter I’ll read next to a cozy fire.
In my ideal day, I go to bed satisfied and content with the fullness of my life.
Communication, culture, connection. These are often cited as things that will be hard to cultivate or maintain in a remote work environment. Nonsense! All three of those are easily solved by adding emojis to your communication repertoire.
It’s true that text has limitations when compared with talking in-person, where you can (sometimes) deduce intent through tone of voice, and where you can see facial expressions, read body language, and hear laughter. I argue, though, that all of those can be communicated by adding emojis to your text-based communication. Emojis signal the feelings your face, voice, or body would typically divulge.
I know my coworkers well through the emojis that they use (and create!) to tell others, “This is what I mean,” “this is the subtext,” or “here is how I feel about this.” You can tell the laughers through their frequent use of the 😂 and 😆 emojis. The creative folks find lesser-used emojis to share subtext. The connectors will make personalized emojis for their coworkers and will react to deeds well done with trophies 🏆 and gold stars 🌟 and confetti 🎉.
For myself, these are the emojis I use most:
😂
Across all the places I communicate — at work and with friends who don’t live nearby — Slack tells me I use the 😂 emoji most. This does not surprise me. See I’m an easy laugh. Also, I love that in Slack it’s called :joy:.
👍
The thumbs up signals clarity and closure that, Yep, I’m good with that, I understand, I’m on board, or Let’s do it. This is my second most used at work.
♥️
The heart is my third most used emoji at work, and the second most in my personal life. At work, I use the heart to express sympathy, thank you, I love what you just said, I think you’re great, stuff like that. In my personal life the heart usually means I love you, I love that for you, I love that picture you just posted.
The high-five seems pretty self-explanatory, but I use it to high-five coworkers when we’ve accomplished something together, to close out a conversation to say, cool, we’re good here, nice work together, I liked working with you on this.
I use the ty heart to say thank you.
We also have about a zillion custom emojis in our work Slack. My personal favorites there:
Now we’re cooking
Omg I love it so much
Aye aye cap’n
Lionel Richie Hello (how I say hello to my team in the morning)
Personalized “Andrea shines” emoji my teammate made for me and uses to celebrate stuff I do ♥️
General all purpose taco rocket
I have not worked in-person with colleagues for more than seven years, and I can honestly say that misunderstandings due to text-based communication are no more frequent than I have seen in other workplaces due to face-to-face communications. I credit emojis with this.
I don’t care about living boldly. I just want to live.
A favorite past-time for my husband and me is to talk about what we’re going to do when we retire. I am eager for when my time is my own, to do with what I please. But when I think of actually having that time, on a daily basis, I get kind of freaked out. Our society is achievement-driven and hyperbolic; everything must be bold and brave, epic and adventurous, the fastest, greatest, biggest, most. Are my dreams big enough? What is my “thing” that defines me? What do I aspire to? What’s my passion?
I worry about these things. I worry that I should have a goal in mind for my life, that I have to be moving toward something.
I’m likely more than halfway through my allotted days. As our kids grow up, I become more aware that the number of years I’ll be here is shrinking. By the time I retire, I’ll be even closer to death.
Life is astonishing. I don’t need big and bold and epic to appreciate the nearly incomprehensible fact that we exist. I continually wonder that we are even here, that we live and breathe and create. We create pragmatic things to help us survive, and we create to bring beauty into the world as well. Who thought to create a piano or a saxophone? I mean look at them! The strings and hammers and keys of the piano, the curves and valves and reed of the saxophone. What must have gone into creating these instruments to make the sounds they make to bring them together as music, and for what reason? For pleasure and beauty. I look around the room I sit in, at the photographs on my wall, and the fountain pens I write with, and the lined notebooks, and the lamps and lightbulbs, the smooth glass windows that slide open and shut, the dishwasher that churns away, the language I type and that’s printed in books, and humans invented all of this! We started with rocks and sticks, and now we have laptops and appliances, electric light and indoor plumbing, toothbrushes and tissue boxes, beds and blankets, and it’s all absolutely marvelous. I can’t get over it.
So when I think about retirement, and my existence right now, I don’t want to waste it. I want to be an active participant in life. I don’t think that means I have to be bold or adventurous. I think it can be simpler than that. I can sniff the air, or grow flowers for birds and butterflies. I can seek the beauty and excellence that so satisfies my soul. These bring me deep pleasure and a sense of awe. I can write small things, and build fires, and make nice dinners, and laugh with my family and friends.
I’m weary of thinking that to live life to its fullest, I need a big dream or that I must be bold or that I should be striving towards something. I think what works better for me is to just savor the life I have in the time that I have it.
When we first moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, nearly 10 years ago, I read (and blogged about) a local newspaper article about how to build durable happiness. The article said that to sustain happiness, we should appreciate and savor, and continue to appreciate and savor, the good things we have in our lives.
I want to lean into winter this year, so when my husband asked me yesterday if I wanted to go hiking with him, I said yes. I had sniffed the air and knew from the forecast that rain was coming. Being cold and wet is pretty much my least favorite state to be in. It’s miserable and uncomfortable and makes me very grumpy, so I almost didn’t join him. I sucked it up, put on multiple layers, including a rain coat, and went anyway.
The roads were clear on the first part of our drive. As we climbed in altitude on the lesser travelled routes, the winding mountain paths got pretty slushy. Rain spit on the windshield, but when we arrived at the trailhead, it stopped. I grabbed my camera and gaiters, and we set off into the snowy forest.
Snowy road to War Spur trail
Though we’re too far from the ocean for me to want to live here forever, I’m grateful that we get to live here right now. We could have ended up in a much less pleasant town. I’m grateful we live in a place with four distinct seasons, with mountains, snow, mosses and ferns, deciduous and evergreen trees, hiking, birds, and natural beauty in every direction. I’m grateful that yesterday, the weather kept people inside, and we had the whole forest to ourselves.
Hikers had been there since the snow fell, but we were the only ones out when we hiked
I’m grateful my husband planned to hike regardless of the forecast, and that I decided to go with him despite my aversion to being cold and wet. I’m grateful we had nowhere to be and nothing we had to do, and we had the freedom and means to go for a day hike. I’m grateful for my wool socks, wool hat, gloves, raincoat, and hard-soled hiking shoes to keep me cozy while hiking in the snow, and that it didn’t rain on us while we were out of the car after all. I’m grateful for my camera to help me capture the scenery. I’m grateful for the sound of the wind in the trees. I’m grateful for our home, where our cats and children were warm and dry.
And I’m grateful for our fireplace, where I built a roaring wood fire when we got back home and the rain finally came down.
I think that was more than five things for today’s Bloganuary prompt, What are 5 things you are grateful for today? I could have written many more! But it would have bored you.
I like that it gets all this mess out of my head. Without writing, I’m not sure I’d be able to maneuver in the physical space of the world. I’d be too busy following tangled mental threads, running on hamster wheels of worry, running things I need to remember over and over again in my mind until I do the thing and I don’t have to remember it anymore.
I shared once that writing for me is like Dumbledore’s Pensieve, a magical repository where he can siphon memories out of his mind for storage and later review: writing things out removes them from my head so that I can get on with my external life. Unlike the Pensieve, I don’t just write memories, and I don’t necessarily write for later review. It’s more of a mental hygiene thing, like brushing my hair or clipping my nails. Writing helps keep things from getting tangled or growing into gnarly curled claws that get in the way of everything, or that break because they weren’t cared for.
I already spend a ton of time in my head. Without writing, I’m not sure how I would get out of it to navigate life.
What makes me laugh? Everything! Wit. Irreverence. Puns. Footballs in the crotch. The best humor is smart and surprising, and my favorite kinds of humor are probably the extremes: the low and base, filled with profanity and to be shared only with the most intimate of friends, in a safe space, which is probably why I love it so much, and high humor, which is sharp and intelligent, like Hannah Gadsby, and which studies the human condition and finds the secrets we all share, then surprises us by bringing them out in the open with such perfect awareness, you’d swear the comic had gone inside the darkest corners of your mind and said, “I see you!” And their comedy shows you’re not alone, and look, everyone is laughing because they too can relate, and hey, this thing you thought was a you thing is actually a human thing.
I especially laugh when high humor is also base. Because it often is.
I laugh at puns, at wordplay, at memes, gifs, emoji reactions, cat videos. Cats are very funny. David Sedaris makes me laugh, especially Me Talk Pretty One Day. All of my favorite people make me laugh. Often when our kids tell me about a new person in their lives, I ask, “Are they funny?”
I guess it’s not true that I laugh at everything, though. Meanness isn’t funny to me. And sitcoms and comedy movies often aren’t that funny to me either. I don’t know why. Perhaps they’re obvious, or basic, or predictable. Or maybe they try too hard. Or maybe it’s just because they’re trying to set the expectation from the beginning that they are going to be funny — “I am a comedy!” — so they lose the element of surprise.
I’m lucky, though, that I laugh easily. My husband says he married me because I’m an easy laugh. But truly, he’s very funny. And our kids have picked up his wit. Dinner time is often a testing ground for landing jokes, and perhaps my favorite part of that is that they all keep trying even when something doesn’t work. They’re not afraid of failure: if a line doesn’t land, they’ll analyze it to see what didn’t work, then try a different approach. I make them all feel good by laughing at everything, but the true test is if you can get a laugh out of a more discerning member of our family. Then you can feel proud of your work.
Butterfly Mind 