Ten simple pleasures
Hey friends,
I’ll be the first to say that I obsess over my ambitions. I dream a lot. I dream about where my creative pursuit will take me, where my family and I will be, what I’ll be building, and more. It got me thinking about how caught up we can get in our dreams. I mentioned before that I felt there’s a lot to appreciate at home.
Similar to home, there’s a lot to appreciate when we’re not lost in daydreams.
Life isn’t worth living when you spend it in the clouds all the time. Remember when Dumbledore told Harry that it does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live?
In an exercise to appreciate what I have, I wanted to share a few of my simplest pleasures. Things or activities that I adore. You see, simple pleasures don’t expire with achievement. And we have thousands of them!
Here’s ten of my simplest pleasures in no particular order:
Comfort and creativity I often find in a coffeeshop
A barren to-do list and an exciting book
Battling over board games with family/friends (+ a few beers)
Jamming out to music in the shower
An essay or newsletter issue that magically writes itself
Rediscovering cherished memories in old photographs
Getting lost within internet rabbit-holes
Cooking an awesome meal (best when shared with others)
The freedom and excitement on the night before an epic vacation
The incredible first sip of coffee in the morning
Although many of these feel inconsequential in my grand mission, they don’t always feel so simple. I love them. They’re bursts of joy that don’t require tens of thousands of dollars or rigorous planning. They happen all the time, and they’re mine.
Please share a couple of yours with me. I’ll share my favorites next time.
Wishing you simple pleasures,
Cullin
I'm not a "foodie" but gratitude exercises always bring me back to food
You see news stories here & there about something microscopic in the water pipes, but it's absurd how much access to food we've experienced throughout our lifetimes. It's not even the sheer quantity of affordable food, but the variety: these geography/culture-specific recipes passed down from tiny climate pockets around the world for millennia that we now get to stack-rank depending on our mood:
"Do you want Tikka Masala or Cheesecake?"
Don't even get me started on how insane it is that I can just tap on a block & get prepared cuisine dropped off at my door within minutes. That the story of humanity is largely foraging for food & only around my precise lifetime we get to live with such over-abundance is absurd, ludicrous, inconceivable.
We live in the friggin' future
...and now my food's getting cold
Loved this post, always so fun to hear about what people do for leisure. Hustle culture is fading away and now we're in a new phase: leisure culture. Some pleasures I love indulging in:
Reading my friends newsletters
Meditating for an hour in the morning - the feeling of the timer going off at the 60 minute mark
The workout I do right after meditating - waking up my body after waking up my soul
Weekends with my girlfriend/Sidequest Sundays
Blogging every morning
Tasting weird beers, coffees, teas, and strange mixtures of the 3 (green tea flavored IPAS)
Writing my newsletter in a coffee shop on a Saturday morning outside because it's California and it's always 70 out