Something Making Us More Happier

• Elizabeth: Going an adventure!
• Gretchen: The night hours at the Metropolitan Museum – on Fridays and Saturdays, it stays open until 9 p.m.

Quality Screen Time: We talk about Get Back, the terrific 2021 documentary directed and produced by Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings fame, available on Disney+, about the Beatles and how they wrote the music for the album Let It Be. 

Elizabeth reads an excerpt from the poem “Adam’s Curse” by William Butler Yeats.

“We sat together at one summer’s end, That beautiful mild woman, your close friend, And you and I, and talked of poetry. I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

Lessons we learned for ourselves:

• Embrace new tools—Elizabeth often reminds herself to “Step into the future”
• Bring in someone new—Billy Preston joined them
• Disagree in a calm voice and use humor to defuse tension
• Ask: Do you need a boss?

I quote from Andy Warhol:

“When I think about what sort of person I would most like to have on a retainer, I think it would be a boss. A boss who could tell me what to do, because that makes everything easy when you’re working.” 
–The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Amazon, Bookshop)

Spotlight on Tools 

Do you want to read more? Here are some tools that might help:

• download the free PDF “Reading Better Than Before”
• read this post about reading more
• listen to episode 310, a Very Special Episode dedicated to hacks and tips for getting more reading done

Quotation

“If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again. Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more. There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me. Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.”
– Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (Amazon, Bookshop)

Christopher Alexander also wrote A Pattern Language (Amazon, Bookshop), one of my very favorite books.

“The best time to start a happiness project is twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.”