Welcome to Small Good Things!

You’re receiving this newsletter because you were a subscriber to my now-defunct newsletter Intensely Delicious, Surprisingly Balanced. If it’s not your thing, I get that! Feel free to stick around or leave as you wish.

Sure, the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.

- Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club

I was raised Quaker, a small subset of Christianity home to pacifists and people who thrive on potlucks and indecision. While I no longer am Quaker, one of its core tenets remains with me: there is light in (mostly) everyone and everything. There is good to be found, in other words, even when you have to look very hard for it, and especially when you have to.

A lot of life feels like that, I think, for many people: a desperate search for proof that despite every disaster and tragedy and the litany of injustices that keeps happening, we can be good to each other. That this world is not, to use the title of an Explosions in the Sky album, “a cold dead place.” A better future is possible if we believe.

Over the past few years, I’ve practiced finding joy in small things. Partly born out of forced habit—thanks, therapy homework—it’s now something I do as a reflex. Sometimes it feels obscene, finding something good: how do you honor disaster by searching for its antidote? Then I remember that emotions are not equations; that we give to each other often is rooted in what we can give to ourselves.

So: soaking rice (or as I like to say, giving rice a bath), or holding a bouquet of green garlic. Shouting at Brandon Nimmo for sprinting to first base on a walk, when he’s given a pass to literally walk there? Or the library receipt that tells me how much I saved by going to the library; or the library, any library; or just the fact of libraries. Free books! Free! Books!

Finding these small things isn’t a denial of how horrible the world can be and currently is. Rather, I believe the practice is vital for our wellbeing, both as individuals and communities. The only lesson I’ve taken from high school science is that neurons that fire together wire together: the more often you do something, the easier it becomes. Joy, like hope, is a muscle.

This is a newsletter about that exercise. Each week-ish, you can expect a short essay about one small good thing—the next issue is about revisiting a favorite album—and a prompt to share your own small good thing, or read what others have shared. Hopefully, this format inspires us to keep practicing.

I’ll see you next week-ish. Until then: wherever you are right now, I hope you’re hanging on, with compassion and fury.