Something Making Us More Happier

• Elizabeth: Unlike most years as a TV writer, this year, she has a real “summer” with a lighter load of work.
• Gretchen: I love working on my Book of Aphorisms. If you have any great “proverbs of the professions,” send them my way. Here’s a collection of some great proverbs from teachers. I also mention my book Outer Order, Inner Calm.

Unforeseen Consequences

After Elizabeth told me to watch the brilliant Get Back documentary about the Beatles, we both became fascinated by the Beatles. Cut to: I went to the Paul McCartney concert in New Jersey!

We talk about the importance of the “atmosphere of growth” to happiness. It was such a fun adventure in sound.

Spotlight on a Tool

Lots of weddings are happening, as people play catch up from all the weddings that were canceled because of Covid. If you’re looking for a great reading for a wedding, download the free PDF here. (There’s also a collection of readings for funerals and memorial services.)

Quality Screen Time — not!

Elizabeth’s example persuaded me to try listening to an audiobook. Usually, I can enjoy listening to a book only if I’ve already read it, but inspired by Elizabeth, I tried again — and loved listening to a series of novellas by Martha Wells: The Murderbot Diaries. I read the print version of the first novella, All System Red (Amazon, Bookshop), but then listened to the next three in audio.

Quotation:

The [hay]rack stood as if it had been there forever across the landscape and lit by the sun with its long shadow behind it, and in harmony with every fold of the field and finally turned into a mere form, a primordial form, even if that was not the word I used then, and it gave me huge pleasure just to look at it. I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now…so the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.
—Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Amazon, Bookshop)