Here’s the thing. My “Compendium of Delight” is intended to share things that have brought me delight since the last time I published. But delight has been hard to come by in the past year and a half. The world feels like it’s on fire, both literally and metaphorically, and the flames just keep getting higher. Not only is delight hard to find, but it feels almost sacrilegious to focus on small delights in the face of everything we’re confronted with.

Then a few days ago I read a piece by Rona Maynard called Let Me Show You Something Beautiful. Rona publishes a Substack called Amazement Seeker in which she writes, beautifully and elegantly, about the small wonders of life. In this particular piece, Rona recalls a moment of beauty that still reverberates for her thirty years later. It was a powerful reminder that beauty is not a frill to be dismissed in times of darkness, but an essential counterweight to suffering, offering moments of grace that make the journey bearable. Or as Rona puts it, “the flare of awe that lights my next step forward when I can’t make out the path.”

Since beauty and delight are intimately intertwined, I decided I not only could still share things that bring delight, but I must. Because without such moments, how can we endure?

So, without further ado, here are some delights that lifted my spirits in the past few months. I hope they lift yours too.

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1. Earlier this year I learned via Instagram about an exhibit in Paris called The Soul Trembles, a major exhibition by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. The bumph in the Instagram post notifies us that Shiota’s installations are “characterized by their use of yarn to create intricate webs that envelop everyday objects … creating immersive experiences that explore themes of memory, temporality, and dreams.” Whatever. They are shimmering works of ethereal beauty, and I sure hope I’ll get a chance to see one of her installations in real life one day.

2. And this guy makes portraits out of pebbles! Here I thought my pebblescapes in our Hornby Island garden were pretty cool, but this is next level.

3. Thanks to Chris Corrigan for sharing this half-hour of underwater wonder: the live stream from EV Nautilus, a research vessel that explores seafloors in the Pacific Ocean with submersible robots. Half the fun of this video is hearing the scientists’ expressions of delight at what they find!

4. One of the things I like to do when I find my attention wandering … (where was I, again?) … oh yeah – attention wandering – is to focus on the sounds around me. It’s very grounding. So imagine how pleased I was to discover BBC’s Library of Sound Effects – over 33,000 sound clips from across the world from the past 100 years! Click and browse them individually, or use them to mix your own soundscapes!

5. Honestly? This makes me want to go to university in Kyoto only so I can graduate from there.

6. What is more randomly delightful than stumbling over “easter eggs” in our urban environment? I’m not talking about the things you paint. I’m referring to little surprises hiding in plain sight: things you’ll totally miss if you don’t look up from your smartphone from time to time. The Star documented 13 Toronto easter eggs in this article. I’m very pleased to say that I chanced on the Lego tower when I was there last summer! Another fabulous easter egg, not mentioned in the article, is the house at 473 Clinton Street that I stumbled across in a previous visit. Must. Be. Seen. To. Be. Believed. The obsessional creativity of people who make stuff like this is truly awe-inspiring.

7. Speaking of creativity, I’m a huge fan of The Oatmeal, a comics and humour website by the very quirky Matthew Inman (of Exploding Kittens fame). You should seriously explore the whole website (OK, maybe not seriously – better to explore it humorously) – but what I want to direct your attention to is his 8-part comic on creativity. It is both hilarious and profound, and I go back to it whenever I need a creative jolt. Plus, his drawings are just … (where’s the chef’s kiss emoji when I need it, dammit?)

8. And because I’m feeling very resist-y these days, I was delighted by this article on joy as an act of resistance. It nicely bookends what I was talking about at the beginning of this newsletter. I recommend reading the whole article, but if it’s too tl;dr, I’ll leave you with its closing paragraph: “If we relinquish our joy, we not only lose a profound source of unity, strength, and resilience, we also lose the point of it all. And so ‘we must risk delight.’ And we must know that to do so is not a distraction from resistance, but one of its greatest sources of power.” Amen to that.

9. Here’s a feisty playlist to accompany reading the abovementioned article – or any time you’re feeling a bit “elbows-up”.

10. And here is your monthly photo. Points if you can figure out what this is and where I shot it!

DISCLAIMER: I don’t get any kickbacks from mentions I make of products or other people’s websites or anything. Indeed, they have no idea I’m mentioning them. By all means check them out and buy stuff from them, but know that it doesn’t fatten my bank account in any way. I’m just sharing what I love.

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It’s been many months since I posted anything, and some of you have asked me where I went. I’ll just say that it’s been some kind of year, and delight has been harder to find than usual. But it feels like now more than ever we need to keep a light in the window to fend off the darkness outside. So here’s my offering to keep that spark alight: a few things that have delighted me in the past year, along with my usual themed playlist and a photo to share with you.

1. I’m a huge fan of guerrilla art, which has been described as “unauthorized displays of creativity”. Anonymous and unexpected, these pieces of art show up in public places, sometimes making a social or political statement (think Banksy) and sometimes simply giving us a different – often humourous – angle on the world. In the latter category, I’ve been delighting in the work of Michael Pederson of Sydney, Australia, who wanders around his city adding witty statements to urban objects and spaces. See some of his work here and some more of it here, and even more on his Instagram. I will never look at the urban landscape the same way again. (I am also seriously tempted to replicate some of these ideas here in Vancouver…)

2. In my last Compendium (written ever so many months ago) I referenced my favourite community-building artist, Wendy MacNaughton. Recently I went back to her website for a bit of inspiration, and her FOCUS poster popped right out at me. Created in 2016 after a destabilizing election, she described it as “a call for creativity in dark times … [a] light to shine through the cracks.” Feels like it’s exactly the right time to bring it back. You know what I’m saying. Wendy is also once again hosting “30 Days of Drawing” at her Grown-Ups Table, starting January 1st. I’m so in! Join me?

3. Here’s a mesmerizing 3-minute visualization that zooms in and out across the known scales of the universe, from the tiniest particle to the vast cosmic web. This higher perspective makes me feel both infinitesimally small – and a miracle of creation. It puts me in mind of a two-sided token I carry around in the tradition of Reb Simcha Bunem, an 18^th-century Hasidic rebbe, who carried around two slips of paper, one in each pocket. On one he wrote: “For my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote: “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out each slip of paper as needed, to maintain himself that we are all miracles of creation – and infinitesimally small.

4. Speaking of small, sometimes it’s the littlest things that give the greatest delight. Here’s a little leafy delight that came across my desk and instantly put a smile on my face. Truly, creativity knows no bounds!

5. And speaking of boundless creativity: ever wondered what music looks like? Check out Stephen Malinowski’s music animations and find out! He’s spent years figuring out how to visualize musical scores by assigning colours to pitches, using colour to show harmony and tonality, incorporating different methods of scrolling, and … God, I don’t know! I am but dust and ashes, remember? Anyway, who cares? Magic is magic. Start with his animated score of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and branch out.

6. Turn up the volume for a 2-minute hit of pure joy.

7. Have I already talked about Priya Parker’s classic book The Art of Gathering? Well, even if I have, it’s worth mentioning again because she is the absolute last word on designing and hosting gatherings, whether for work or for play – or (my favourite) both! How we meet matters. I’m here for it.

8. Gearing up for your new year’s resolutions? Try my friend David Roche’s approach instead. He makes Old Year Resolutions (which he calls Irresolutions), and here’s how he does it: “I make a checklist with only checks on it, as many as I want, down the left-hand side. Then I write next to each check something I did [last year]. And done. What I did is what I must have resolved to do. Try it. It’s much easier and you will feel proud of yourself immediately, realizing that you are a person of great resolve and discipline. You will avoid the shame and anxiety of so-called ‘resolutions’.” Genius.

9. Here’s a winter playlist to keep you company in the dark.

10. And finally, a photo to mean whatever you want it to mean. Happy new year!

    

2) The book Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman, is subtitled “Time management for mortals.” But it’s less about time management than about how we manage our relationship to time. Which is why I love it. I’m so over books that give me yet another prescription for dividing my time into finite chunks in which to be ever more productive. Please! What Burkeman gives us instead are reflections on how to spend our time more meaningfully. The closer I get to my own four thousand weeks, the more that matters to me. Highly recommended.

3) Wendy MacNaughton (aka WendyMac) is an artist who uses drawing to tell stories about people, places and things, and to build community. During the pandemic she launched an online program called DrawTogether that brought kids together from all around the world to draw together with Wendy and each other. Later, she expanded into the Grown-Ups Table (aka GUT), where she shares art tips and assignments with us grown-up kids who want to (re)discover the joy and fun of drawing. I had a lot of fun doing her 30-Day Drawing Habit in January – it did more to get me back in touch with my inner artist than anything I’ve done in a long time. My sketchbook is slowly filling up again!

4) Speaking of time, are there any lines of poetry that are more resonant and urgent than the last three lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day? “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Indeed.

5) Struggling with putting down your phone? Maybe you need … a Screen Monkey! Thank you to Jeanne Lambin for possibly the most creative and hilarious solution to smartphone addiction that I’ve come across. Now to find that stuffed monkey… (PS: I just clicked onto Jeanne’s website, and what do you suppose is splashed right across her home page? Check it out!)

6) Jeanne also introduced me to the Nature Soundmap – an online atlas that lets you discover nature sounds from all around the world. Just click on any of the purple hearts and enjoy what you hear. You can even filter by the kind of sound you want to hear, the region, the habitat, and so on. I’m listening to singing humpbacks as I write this. Pure delight!

7) What do you get when you mash up string theory with Queen? You get Bohemian Gravity! This delightful video has been kicking around for at least 10 years, but it never gets old for me. Never mind the science (which is entirely opaque to me) – the editing on this thing is astounding! Plus, who else can sing all four parts of a song from soprano to bass??

8) Quote of the month: “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by.” – Annie Dillard

9) An invitation to spend some time listening to tunes about time…

10) Subject + camera movement = a brief image of time passing!

*DISCLAIMER: I don’t get any kickbacks from any mentions I make of products or other people’s websites or anything. Indeed, they have no idea I’m mentioning them. By all means check them out and buy stuff from them, but know that it doesn’t fatten my bank account in any way. I’m just sharing what I love.

2) When I need a little 20-minute hit of joy, I often log on to CBC Gem to watch an episode or two of Still Standing. In each one we travel along with comedian Jonny Harris to a different small town somewhere in Canada, meet the delightful and often-quirky locals, and laugh along with them as he “finds the funny” in these out-of-the-way places that are “on the ropes but still standing.” Jonny pokes gentle fun (mostly at himself) without ever being disrespectful, and the show never fails to bring me a chuckle – or several.

3) At the other end of the humour scale, I’ve recently discovered Shalom Auslander’s Fetal Position on Substack. Shalom’s humour is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. It’s dark, provocative, edgy, and often angry. Where Jonny Harris tickles with his humour, Shalom spears us with his. But I love it. He serves up hard truths with a mordant wit, and even when I disagree with him, I appreciate having my views challenged. Plus, I find many of his posts strangely hopeful at the end. Go figure.

4) In an earlier newsletter I wrote about Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, in which he poetically celebrates the small delights of everyday life. Well, hooray – he’s back! Once again setting himself the project of writing about one delight a day for a year, his new Book of (More) Delights reminds us once again that delight can be found anywhere if we only take the trouble to look.

5) My apartment, being on the ground floor, is often quite cold in winter. It has baseboard heaters, but they’re expensive and add no particular charm to the room. So last winter I bought an electric fireplace, which now “burns” brightly in the corner of my living room and is an ongoing source of cozy delight. Designed to look like an old-fashioned wood stove, it adds a nice touch of rustic to my space, and the electric flames are surprisingly realistic, making me feel warm even when the actual heat bars are off. I give the electric fireplace five stars.

6) This fall my sweetie and took a six-week vacation (a delight in itself) to travel in Portugal, Corsica, and Paris. Each place served up a multitude of delights, and today I’d like to feature one of them: the calçada Portuguesa – Portugal’s splendid mosaic pavements. I know: the stones come loose and create a tripping hazard. Furthermore, they’re slippery when wet. Watch your step. But oh, they are gorgeous!

7) Another delight was the music we encountered on our travels. We took in a few fado clubs in Lisbon and Coimbra, and two concerts of vocal polyphonic music in Corsica, all of which were transcendently wonderful. But the hands-down highlight was attending a rehearsal of the Spartimu ensemble in a church just outside of Ajaccio, and (OMG, OMG) singing with them at the end of their rehearsal. A Hebrew song, no less – one that I’ve known since childhood. Direct fast track to heaven.

8) Quote of the month: “It is one of those paradoxes of life: we don’t do hard things because we’re resilient; we are resilient because we do hard things.” – David DuChemin

9) Well, with a blog post focused on hope, how could I not follow through with a playlist on the same theme? Here’s 97 minutes of hope for your listening pleasure. And bonus videos of two of the songs: Light One Candle, by Peter, Paul & Mary, and One Day, by Matisyahu and 3000 of his best friends. You’re allowed to cry. I do every time.

10) Two photos this month to light up the dark.

*DISCLAIMER: I don’t get any kickbacks from any mentions I make of products or other people’s websites or anything. Indeed, they have no idea I’m mentioning them. By all means check them out and buy stuff from them, but know that it doesn’t fatten my bank account in any way. I’m just sharing what I love.

2) I read Becoming Duchess Goldblatt as an e-book and loved it so much that I bought the real book (i.e. printed on paper) so I could have the satisfaction of holding it in my hands and turning its lovely paper pages. Which tells you two things: (1) I think paper books are much nicer than e-books, and (2) I was so delighted by this book that I was willing to pay for it twice. That’s all I’m going to tell you about it, but you can read this review to find out more. (PS: if the NY Times blocks you from accessing it, I’ve attached a PDF of the article below.)

3) In this world of chaos and conflict, sometimes I just need a good belly laugh. Daniel LaBelle’s high-octane Instagram videos crack me up reliably. No guarantee he’ll have the same effect on everyone, but let me know if he does for you! (You can also find him on YouTube if you’re not on Instagram.)

4) In an earlier newsletter I shared some images of nudibranchs, a sea creature that delights me immeasurably. Another, even smaller (as in: microscopic) critter that delights me is the tardigrade. I mean, just look at that little guy. Is it not the cutest thing? Not only that, but tardigrades are the very definition of resilience. I’m feeling like there’s an untapped market for tardigrade stuffies…

5) A few months ago my friend Chris Corrigan shared a post on making robots talk to each other. “Take an English-based nonsense word generator,” he wrote, “enter its output into ChatGPT, and invite the Ai to create definitions for the nonsense words and we might actually be able to finally make English as expressive as German!” That’s as good a use for AI as anything else I can think of. Nerdy wordy fun for all!

6) Some people’s imagination boggles my mind. Tatsuya Tanaka is a miniature artist who combines everyday objects in unexpected ways to create tiny, delightful scenes that make my heart sing. He posts his delights daily on Instagram – or you can see his whole miniature calendar on his website.

7) Radiooooo is a website and an app dreamed up by “a little family of friends, DJs and music lovers who decided to share their music collection.” Click on any location on the map and on a decade, and Radiooooo will start playing music from that place and time. You can even choose between “slow”, “fast”, and “weird”. As I write this, I’m listening to bouncy Swedish music from the 1940s. Now I’m listening to Portuguese fado from 1958. Now …

8) Quote of the month: “We made a mistake. That’s good. We just learned something.” – Keith Johnstone

9) When I redesigned my website last year (thanks to the amazing team at Yuplook), I told them, “I want it to look like ‘80s dance music feels.” They got it. In honour of Chris and his team, this month’s playlist is an ‘80s dance party. Crank it up!

10) This month’s photo is about music too.

*DISCLAIMER: I don’t get any kickbacks from any mentions I make of products or other people’s websites or anything. Indeed, they have no idea I’m mentioning them. By all means check them out and buy stuff from them, but know that it doesn’t fatten my bank account in any way. I’m just sharing what I love.

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This blog post is about time. And it’s been a long time coming. I’ve started it several times over the past few months, and each time I’ve run into a dead end. But having recently passed a Milestone Birthday, it feels like it’s time to try again. Mainly because it was a birthday that reminded me rather forcefully that I have considerably less time ahead of me than I do behind, and – in the immortal words of the poet Mary Oliver – “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

What, indeed?

Please don’t worry that I’m feeling morbid about this. On the contrary. The fact that life is finite doesn’t bother me except to the extent that I know I’ll have lots of unfinished business when I finally blink out. (And I’m not talking about my endless “to-do” list.) Indeed, it’s the very brevity of our time here on earth that makes life so precious. Eternity is boring. If you don’t believe me, watch the final season of The Good Place. You’ll see.

No: what concerns me – and apparently most of us, judging by the plethora of books and articles on the subject – is what I do with my time while I’m here. How I fill my minutes, my hours, my days. Annie Dillard, this time: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And I’m here to tell you that those days fly by awfully fast, until we find ourselves standing on the threshold of yet another Milestone Birthday looking at our lives and asking, like David Byrne, “Well? How did I get here?” What have I done with my one wild and precious life so far, and what do I propose to do with what’s left of it?

If most of those books and articles are to be believed, we’re supposed to manage our time and use it productively. Well…I don’t know about that. Time management has always struck me as a slightly strange concept. Time is an unruly beast and seems quite resistant to being managed. Me: “Hey, time: please start operating along this set of principles, beginning today.” Time: “I don’t think so. Here, I’ve got something else for you! Catch!” As the old Yiddish saying has it: “Mann tracht und Gott lacht” – “Man plans and God laughs.” Maybe God is Time.

So maybe what we’re really talking about is not how to manage time, but how to manage our approach to it (harking back to Mary Oliver and Annie Dillard, above). What is the best use of our time? Well, that varies from one day to the next. Some days we certainly need to use it “productively” in the usual workaday sense: attend to our work, complete tasks, check off items on our to-do list – that sort of thing. But some days we need to release our tight hold on time and let ourselves wander – physically, mentally, or both. Go for an aimless walk, giving ourselves time and space to notice what we see, hear, smell along the way. Lie down in the grass and watch the clouds drift by. Grab a piece of paper and a fat pen and doodle while listening to a piece of music. In other words, let life in and see what it brings us.

Above all – above ALL, people! – make time for the people we care about. If I have any regrets in life (and I’m happy to say I don’t have too many), it’s that I haven’t always given my loved ones as much time as they deserved. I have a reminder on my wall that says “Inconvenience yourself.” I took that from Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful book Four Thousand Weeks, in which he says a lot of wise things about time, one of them being that, contrary to the popular cliché, what counts in our relationships isn’t the thought, but the effort we put into them – i.e. the inconvenience. It’s inconvenient to do something that takes time and effort, but the fact that we do take the time and effort renders the action more meaningful, both to ourselves and to the person on whom we’ve bestowed the gift of our precious time.

So what is all my rambling about time about? I guess, in the end, it’s about being conscious about how we spend our time, and filling it – to the extent we can – with the activities (or passivities) that make our days meaningful and beautiful.* And of course – to the extent we can – to make the world at least a marginally better place for having had the incredible good fortune to spend some time here.

And now I’m going to go to my local supermarket and shop for groceries to make a delicious and time-consuming dinner for my sweetie, because it’s Valentine’s Day as I write this, and what better way to spend my time today than doing things that show him I love him?

*Of course, I need to acknowledge that I write this out of a place of incredible privilege, being someone who is in a position to choose how I spend my time. I recognize all too painfully that this is not the case for way too many people in the world, and so part of how I spend my time must be to do what I can to change that in whatever ways I can.

“Hope is the thing with feathers – ” That’s the beginning of an oft-quoted poem by Emily Dickinson. She likens hope to a bird that perches in our soul, singing a melody without words even in the most turbulent storms, and never asks even a crumb from us in return.

It’s a lovely poem, but I see hope differently. To me it looks more like a spark, or a tiny flame that – far from needing anything from us – requires careful tending in order not to blink out.

Let’s face it: we are living in turbulent times. I know that for many people – too many – times are always turbulent. But collectively, globally, this feels like a particularly bleak period in our history. Wars (too many to list). Increasing polarization. A frightening uptick in hate of all kinds. A rise in authoritarianism. Dehumanization of the “other”. Everyone hollering at everyone else in real life and in cyberspace. Fill in your own catastrophe – there are plenty to choose from. And the climate crisis looming over them all. Can I be honest here? Some days that spark of hope seems very faint indeed.

And yet. And yet. Somehow we hold onto hope. It feels like we must. Not a cockeyed “everything will be OK” hope. That feels almost offensive to me these days. No, I’m talking about the hope that is active, not passive. The hope that looks at a world in which everything is most decidedly not OK and takes one action, one step to make it better. The hope that lights a single candle in the dark, and then another candle and another, and then carries their tiny flame to light the candle of their neighbour, creating a brighter and brighter glow with each step.

“Don’t let the light go out,” sang Peter, Paul & Mary, “It’s lasted for so many years. Don’t let the light go out, let it shine through our love and our tears.” We need to tend to the light. We need to augment it. We need to share the light. We need to pass it on.

That’s what hope looks like to me.

So, in the spirit of hope, and in no particular order, I share with you a list of things that bring a spark of light and hope into my world right now:

• • The groups of Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs who, against all odds and in the face of their own enormous pain, trauma and loss, are working together to build a just and peaceful society for all who live in those lands.*

  • The people who recognize and can dance in life’s complexities, who refuse binary, either/or “solutions”, and who can hold apparent contradictions without imploding.

  • The unsung heroes who simply sow kindness in their everyday lives and whose gestures and deeds make other people’s days a little bit brighter.

  • The appearance of the first shoots of green after a long, grey winter.

  • Making music. Especially making music with friends. Especially singing with friends. I think it’s impossible to be angry with someone when you’re singing with them. Maybe we should require people in conflict to sit around a table and sing together. In harmony. Maybe that’s the first step to world peace. What the heck – it couldn’t hurt to try!

  • My beloved community of applied improvisers who embody an expansive, positive, generous, “yes and” approach to life that sees possibilities everywhere and never fails to uplift and bring joy.

  • The ability to laugh in the face of life’s absurdities – and really, just laughter in general. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” the saying goes. I would add: where there’s laughter, there’s also hope.

  • The sound of birdsong in the trees in the morning.

  • The incredible outpouring of creativity and innovation when necessity gives birth to invention.

  • The way people come together in a crisis, even if only for one brief, shining moment.

  • A beautiful sunrise. An equally beautiful sunset. A big, orange full moon hanging just above the horizon.

  • The fact that artists keep making art, musicians keep making music, inventors keep on inventing, even when society tells them there’s no “need” for what they produce. They know better.

  • The blessing of friendship.

This list is incomplete. I know that as soon as I hit “publish” I’ll think of several other things that give me hope. (Which is a hopeful thought in itself!) But a blog post has to end somewhere, so this is where I’ll stop.

In the spirit of passing it on, I’d like to invite you to share in the comments what gives you hope. It will be read by at least four other people! Maybe even six! I am well on my way to becoming a micro-influencer (yeah, right).

In the meantime, I wish you many sparks of light as we navigate the dark season together – and may the coming year bring us ever more reasons to hope.

* Here are 3 of those groups that I support: The Parents Circle–Families Forum. Standing Together. Combatants for Peace. They are all my heroes.

As I write this, my beloved and I are in the final stages of prepping for a 6-week trip to Europe. There’s a lot that goes into planning a trip like this, and whenever we travel together I send up several prayers of thanks that I don’t have to do it alone. Oh, I’ve travelled alone many times over the years and have been very comfortable doing so – but organizing a trip is just so much easier and more pleasant when I can split the work with someone else whose interests and skills complement mine. For example, booking flights reduces me to tears, but Avi will cheerfully dig through travel websites for hours to find a flight that is both economical and doesn’t involve multiple stops or 24-hour layovers in boring airports. He has the same facility for booking car rentals, which I wouldn’t even touch because the very thought of driving unknown roads gives me the vapours, while he delights in slaloming along curvy one-lane country roads with mountains on one side and cliffs on the other.

I, on the other hand, will happily work my way through several pages of Google to find an obscure blog that points me to the perfect non-Expedia/non-Booking.com guesthouse or pore through endless Airbnb listings to find the place that offers maximum comfort, convenience and charm for the best price. I’m also the go-to gal for sourcing great places to eat and drink, and am a walking dowsing rod for finding misplaced objects (ask me about the time I found Avi’s hearing aid in a pile of leaves in a park that we’d left a couple of hours earlier and had to find again).

If you haven’t already figured out where this long introduction is leading, I’ll cut to the chase: I’m talking about teamwork. That thing we all talk about but don’t always practise but we should, because good teamwork makes everything better, easier, and more fun. (And hint: if it isn’t good teamwork, it isn’t teamwork at all but something else masquerading as teamwork. If that’s happening in your workplace, we should talk.)

The power of teamwork was brought home to me in a big way over the past year when I was part of the planning team for the Applied Improvisation Network’s 2023 conference, which took place here in Vancouver in July. Anyone who has ever planned an event knows you can’t do it alone, but until you’re actually doing it, you don’t quite realize how much of a team effort it is or how many heads, hearts and hands are needed to make it work. And critically, you need the right combination of people with complementary skills and interests. For example: I’m a whiz at taking minutes, setting up systems, and keeping things organized – but don’t ever ask me to be in charge of anything to do with money! Fortunately, someone else on the team was good at that and was willing and able to take on the mantle of treasurer. That same person would have bombed at social media – but guess what? Another team member did that with verve and élan! And so on and so forth. Each person took on what they were good at and interested in (with most of us filling multiple roles), and as the conference drew nearer we all pitched in wherever we were needed and able, and pulled together to create what many participants described as a seamless experience.

As it happens, I’ve always loved working (and playing) as part of a team. Probably because for me (you’ve heard me say this before), everything boils down to relationships, and teamwork is all about relationships. Working closely together toward a shared goal can build a sense of camaraderie that extends well beyond the project at hand and can even bloom into real friendships. But even if it doesn’t go that far, it contributes to a happier and healthier work environment – which, for the record, equals a more productive and successful work environment. (You’ve heard me say that before too!)

What else do you get from great teamwork? I’m glad you asked! How’s this for starters:

• Diverse perspectives: As we learned from our conference experience, teamwork taps into a wealth of perspectives. Each team member brings their unique skills, experiences, and ideas to the table, leading to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

• Enhanced creativity: Teamwork gives us a chance to let our creativity run wild, feed off each other’s energy and ideas, and watch as our collective imagination takes shape. This helps us generate innovative solutions we could never have come up with on our own.

• Shared responsibility: Teamwork makes a project more manageable by dividing the workload and delegating responsibilities based on people’s strengths and expertise. This ensures that no single person is overwhelmed by the process (except at 4:00 AM when we all wake up with that sense of Deep Existential Overwhelm no matter what), and that team members are able to focus on what they do best.

• Accountability: Team members hold each other accountable for their tasks and responsibilities. This ensures that everyone is working toward a common goal and meeting deadlines, reducing the chances of last-minute emergencies or oversights. And when those emergencies inevitably occur (hey, I said “reducing”, not “eliminating”!) the team pulls together to pull through.

• Learning opportunities: Teamwork provides opportunities for personal and professional growth, as team members learn from each other, acquire new skills, and gain valuable experience that can benefit future endeavours.

• Fun: Can we just say it? When a team is working well together, it’s just plain fun! Sure, there are moments when you want to strangle each other (kind of like in any relationship) – but these are far outweighed by moments of giddy laughter, delightful discoveries, celebration, and the shared memories the team members create together.

And now I’m off to do my share of the final planning, prepping, and packing for our big trip. Any blog posts I write between now and November will be travel stories. No guarantees – I might be too immersed in the experience to feel like writing about it – but I’ve set up a travel blog just in case. Feel free to follow along at https://avrilabroad.travellerspoint.com. In the meantime, bonne rentrée, shana tova … and see you in November when I’m back at my desk!

2)    In the aforesaid post I referenced The Art of Noticing – a delightful book that inspires us to look at the world more attentively and see it in new and wonderful ways. Rob Walker, the author, also publishes a TAoN newsletter, in which he shares more ideas and prompts for paying attention. Recently he floated the idea of keeping a “never again” journal to record moments that will never happen again in the same way, and I decided to take up the offer. I emailed him to let him know his idea had taken root and sent him a photo of my tiny journal. Imagine how thrilled I was to hear back from him asking if he could share it in his newsletter – and how even more thrilled I was to see it written up in his next issue under the heading Dept. of Inspiring Readers! Not only that, but another TAoN reader, Jeremy Caplan, picked up on it and featured my journal in his WonderTools newsletter! I’m thoroughly enjoying my moment of nano-fame. (And the WonderTools newsletter is very cool too, by the way.)

3)    What if you went to a restaurant and the server delivered a meal you didn’t order? That’s what might happen if you ate at the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders, a pop-up restaurant in Tokyo that only staffs people living with dementia. Why? Because Shiro Oguni, the restaurant’s founder, wanted to “spread dementia awareness and to make society just that little bit more open minded and relaxed.” And it’s working. According to staff calculations, “37% of orders are generally mistaken, but 99% of the customers declared themselves happy.” I’m happy just thinking about this. (Also: if I ever get dementia, I’m applying for a job there!)

4)    And while we’re on the subject: if I ever get dementia and have to be moved out of my home, I want to live in a place like this. (Though unfortunately, not being government funded, it’s well beyond my pay scale. Hello, government: time to normalize this kind of care, please.)

5)    You know how some people come up with stuff you would never in a million years imagine doing? Like crushing objects in a hydraulic press to see what will happen to them? (Yep, it’s a thing, and it’s weirdly satisfying.) Well, then there’s next-level “I would never imagine,” as exemplified by Sarah “Smac” McCreanor’s hydraulic press interpretive dances. You read that right. Watch and be delighted.

6)    One of my all-time favourite comic strips is Calvin and Hobbes. Besides being hilarious, it’s also wise, psychologically astute, and deeply philosophical. (In fact, I remember someone telling me it was the favourite comic of philosophy majors – which, as a former philosophy major myself, doesn’t surprise me in the least.) Author Bill Watterson broke his fans’ hearts when he stopped publishing the strip in 1995, leaving us with only our volumes of collected C&H comic strips to revisit fondly over the years. But great news: he’s resurfaced with The Mysteries, a “fable for grown-ups” that “dares to intimate the big questions about our place in the universe.” It’s due for release in October – just in time for my birthday. Yes, please!

7)    Quote of the month: “Even our deepest convictions, it seemed to me, arise only out of a patient, step-by-step commitment to the details of the day, and only by paying the closest attention to the minutiae of this world could one begin to make out the lineaments of some other.” – Pico Iyer, Tropical Classical

8)    I couldn’t stay on theme for my playlist this month – there just isn’t a lot of music about noticing! But hey, it’s July, so here are some summery sounds to go with your frozen margarita.

9)    This month’s photo isn’t a single photo. It’s a collage of little snapshots I took during one of my “Covid walks” when I decided to pay attention to the sidewalk.

No one wants to go back to the early frightening days of the pandemic when the world ground to a halt, all the news was dire, and we were all locked into cones of isolation. Uncertainty abounded, anxiety ran high, and I woke up many mornings in a state of vague, shapeless panic.

The one thing that helped me was walking. Vancouver was blessed with a warm, sunny spring that year, and whenever I felt the my anxiety mounting, I would throw myself out of doors and just walk and walk and walk. And with all the usual amenities shuttered I looked at everything else around me, because the only other place to go was my thoughts, which was not a pleasant place. So I looked. And I noticed. I noticed the riotous colours of the flowers in bloom. (Vancouver is splendidly bloomy in spring.) I noticed the varied songs of the birds in the trees, and the music-note patterns they made on the staves of the overhead wires. I noticed the cracks in the pavement and the graffiti on the walls, the empty parking spots on Main Street and the social distancing dots on the sidewalk.

Are you picking up on the theme here? It was a time of noticing – at least for me – because noticing was pretty much all there was to do. And here’s the lovely thing: our minds, undistracted, are creative places, and my noticing began to expand from “what is” to “what if?” What if the graffiti were secret messages masquerading as art? What if the cracks in the pavement were maps of unexplored territories? Or if the tiny weeds growing out of the sidewalk were miniature forests for bugs? And the mysterious openings and holes in the environment, portals to other worlds?

So yes, it was a bewildering and frightening time. But it was also a forced respite from the daily grind of busyness and a chance to notice the world around me, to find beauty in unexpected places and see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

In my quest to pay closer attention to my surroundings, I was aided by a couple of great resources and one magical tool. The first resource was Rob Walker’s wonderful book The Art of Noticing, which is filled with activities to heighten our attention and see the world anew. Go on a colour walk. Make a sound or a scent map. Look up – and then look further up. Imagine ordinary objects are art. And so on. Every short chapter is a prompt to notice aspects of our surroundings we usually overlook, and re-enchants us with the delightful strangeness of the world.

Another resource I drew on heavily during Covid was my friend and coach Amy Walsh’s #DomesticInfinite project on Instagram: a series of creative prompts intended to help us shift into a space of possibility by finding the strange and wondrous in the familiar things that surround us. #DomesticInfinite was a time-specific project, but it’s still on Instagram and continues to provide delicious food for the imagination.

And that magic tool? My camera. We’re often exhorted to put down our cameras and just “be in the moment.” And I get it. Since the advent of smartphones everyone is a photographer, all of the time. Try taking a photo of any landmark nowadays without picking up at least several people taking selfies in front of it! It’s like: stop, pose, snap, go. But there’s another kind of photography that not only deepens the moment but opens up new ways of seeing. That’s the kind of photography that creates magic.

Without my camera, I often float through the landscape in a daydream – my head filled with imaginary conversations, plans, worries about work, the state of the world, that pain in my lower back. (Sound familiar?)  With my camera, though, I’m on a constant hunt for the interesting, the curious, the beautiful, and the weird. And that’s where the magic comes in: because the more I look, the more I see, and the more wonderful even the most mundane things become. That pattern of cracks in the pavement can absorb me for half an hour as I angle my camera this way and that, zoom in and out, play with blur and multiple exposures to turn what I see into art.

My camera accompanied me on all my “Covid walks”, and I still get a kick out of seeing what it saw. Or more accurately: what it helped me notice, both in front of me and inside me.

Life has since reverted to its usual busy pace. I no longer take long, aimless walks each day and I don’t always bring my camera when I do. I’m as guilty as anyone of paying more attention to the little screen in my hand than to the world around me. But there’s a little voice in the back of my head that chirps up periodically, when I notice I’m not noticing, and reminds me to look up, look around, notice. Because this precious moment will never happen again … and besides: who knows what magic lies just beyond sight if only I pay attention?

Here are some of the things I saw on my Covid walks in early 2020:

2) Speaking of language: if you love words and you love beautiful illustrations, you will adore Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World, by writer/illustrator Ella Frances Sanders. It’s a thoroughly delightful compendium of words in different languages that express concepts we simply don’t have a word for in English. But as soon as you see them in this book, you will wonder why we don’t, and wish we did. Just gorgeous.

3) I’ve been a big fan of David Byrne since his days as frontman for the Talking Heads. He’s a wonderful singer and musician, of course – but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. From what I can tell, he’s someone who thinks about and tries his hand at everything – from music to theatre to neuroscience to architecture to the environment to … well, everything. The breadth of his interests is mind-boggling, as you can see from his website. I particularly recommend his online magazine, Reasons To Be Cheerful, which focuses on “smart, proven, replicable solutions to the world’s most pressing problems” (sorry, no cute kitties) and reminds us that there is reason to hope after all.

4) Have you noticed that there is a lot of talk recently about increasing productivity by asking people to work less? As in: fewer days per week with no increase in hours per day and no decrease in pay? As someone who is a big fan of working less (I mean it, people: we have a serious workaholism problem in North America), I was delighted to read that a 6-month trial run by this company reported greater well-being among its employees, improved staff retention, and an actual rise in company revenue! And other companies have reported similar results. Time to make this a global movement, methinks…

5) I generally have a love/hate relationship with technology, finding most to be a mixed bag of convenience and frustration. But this spring I discovered one that I flat-out love: the AirTag! My AirTag now lives permanently in my suitcase, and it is such a relief to check it on arrival and see that my bags have arrived with me, even before they show up on the carousel. And if they haven’t arrived, it will tell me where they are! Of course, then you have to actually get the airline to follow up, which can be … interesting (looking at you, Air Canada). But that’s another, less delightful, story. The downside: AirTags are only compatible with Apple devices. But surely Android has an equivalent…?

6) Baraye is not a song that sparks delight – on the contrary, it’s heartbreaking – but it is riveting, beautiful, and tragically necessary. Our choir, Rhythm ‘N’ Roots, will be singing this song in our season-end concert as a tribute to the Iranian people in their heroic quest for freedom. Listen, and dream with me of a day when songs like this will not be needed anymore.

7) Quote of the month: “Keep the company of those who seek the truth – run from those who have found it.” – Vaclav Havel

8) It’s spring! At least here in the northern hemisphere. Here is a playlist to celebrate my favourite season.

9) And finally, this month’s photo, also celebrating spring:

It’s always been a bit challenging for me to explain to people what I do, especially in my role as a visual facilitator. Sometimes they’re familiar with the field, but other times I’ve gotten puzzled looks and questions like, “Oh, you’re like a courtroom illustrator?” Or “So you’re going to do caricatures of us?” Or (my favourite): “An artist, eh? So we’re all gonna have to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?” (For the record, the answers to the above are: (1) Well, no. (2) Nope. (3) Why is it always Kumbaya?? Can’t we sing something else?)

So I finally came up with a succinct (if slightly tongue-in-cheek) descriptor: I tell people I’m their “CCO for hire.” And what is a CCO, they ask? Well, organizations have CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and various other Chief Something Officers, so my job is to be the CCO: the Chief Clarity Officer. That generally gets an appreciative chuckle – partly because it’s unexpected, and partly because people get it. When I’m recording or facilitating a meeting using words combined with images, it’s not about me making art: it’s about bringing clarity to the conversation. Helping people see what they’re saying so they can understand themselves and each other better.

And if there is anything we need in the workplace – and in the world – it’s clarity. Every day we encounter words we think we all understand: words like leadership, sustainability, innovation, best practices, respect, and so on. But unlike things (a table, a flower, a camera), these are all abstractions. Abstractions that are so embedded in our vocabulary that we don’t see how subjective and ambiguous they are. So I like to ask my clients: what does this concept look like on the ground? How would I draw it? Does your image of a leader look like a football coach? A symphony conductor? A social media influencer? What behaviours look like respect to you? Are they the same as what looks like respect to a teacher? An Elder? An army sergeant? What I’m saying is that words mean different things at different times to different people – and if we’re going to understand each other, we have to be clear that we’re talking about the same thing.

At the most benign level, a lack of clarity leads to confusion and makes it difficult to address issues effectively. For example, if we don’t have a shared understanding of sustainability (or innovation, or best practices, or whatever), how will we ever achieve it? Which, I think, is why things so often bog down between the idea and the implementation.

But at another level, unclarity can be downright dangerous. This shows up most glaringly in the realm of politics. In 2016 Donald Trump ran on a huge abstraction: “Make America Great Again.” A slogan that apparently meant something to a whole lot of people – but what, exactly? Who is America? What does “great” look like – and for whom? What period of “great” do we want to return to? One could imagine many different answers to these questions – and we don’t have to exercise our imaginations very strenuously to know how this abstraction has played out in real life (and not just in the US, by the way).

Or take the word “freedom,” which might be one of the murkiest words in the  current political vocabulary. What do we mean when we talk about freedom? Freedom to exercise our civil rights and fulfill our purpose unhindered? Freedom to be who we are without fear regardless of race, sexuality, gender identity, religion, and so on? To go to school or work or knock on a stranger’s door without fearing for one’s life? Or are we talking about freedom to impose our agenda on others because we have the money and the power to do so? Freedom to carry an assault weapon into the classroom or office? Freedom to push anyone “not like us” into the shadows so we don’t have to be offended by their presence? The word “freedom” is used by different people to mean all these things and more. What happens when people with different understandings of this grand abstraction clash with each other? Just look around. It isn’t pretty.

So yeah, I’m happy to appoint myself CCO and continue to push for us to go beyond abstractions when we talk. I will continue to ask questions like: What does that word/phrase/idea mean? What does it look like? How does it play out in action? Who does it serve? By continually striving to make the abstract more concrete, I will try to bring fuzzy ideas into clearer focus, thereby helping those with good intentions be more effective in their actions – and reducing the power of those with less-than-good intentions by exposing them for what they are.

Clarity. Our lives and our world depend on it. Do I make myself perfectly clear?

1) Following the pattern I set with my first blog post, I started out planning to write about one topic for my second one and ended up landing on another one. All because of a notebook that caught my eye. This month: kindness.

2) In my blog post I referenced The Regional Assembly of Text.* The RA has lived near me on Main St. for 17 years, and is an unlikely success story. I mean, who would expect a shop that specializes in notebooks and paper and cards and tiny quirky handmade books to last that long, let alone thrive? Yet here they are, and they even have a second shop in Victoria! If you’re hooked on paper like I am, this place is heaven. Feast your eyes.

3) Are you sick of movies and TV shows whose central draw is violence? I am. Like we don’t have enough violence in the world already. So I was delighted to learn about a gentle TV series on Netflix called The Makanai, about two Japanese girls who set out to become maikos (apprentice geishas). They’re devoted friends, but only Sumire has the chops to become a maiko. But it turns out Kiyo is a great cook, and she becomes the maiko house cook (makanai). Doesn’t sound like much – but it’s a charming ode to friendship, food, and women. Warning: do not watch on an empty stomach!

4) Ross Gay is an American poet who actively studies and pursues joy. I haven’t read much of his poetry yet, but I fell in love with The Book of Delights, his book of essays celebrating the small delights of everyday life. And (oh, joy!) he has now followed it up with his latest book, Inciting Joy, which is about (wait for it) joy – but also about sorrow and love and gardens and grief and fear and … well, just life. Gorgeous.

5) If you ever had any doubt that nature has a marvellous sense of style, meet the nudibranch. And because you’ll want to see more of them after you’ve followed that link, here you go. You’re welcome.

6) In my last blog post I referenced the great Austin Kleon, who describes himself simply as “a writer who draws.” That’s a modest description for a guy who is one of the most prolific creators around and who The Atlantic magazine calls “positively one of the most interesting people on the Internet.” His blog posts are thought-provoking and inspiring, and his weekly newsletter always contains at least a couple of links I can’t resist following.

7) Time for some music! As I did last month, I’ve created a playlist that pairs with my blog post – this time on the theme of kindness.

8) This month’s photo: The Magic Forest. (Click on the image to see it larger.)

The other day I stopped by one of my favourite shops, The Regional Assembly of Text, (paper! paper! paper!) to buy a birthday card for a friend. After buying five birthday cards (because you can never have too many), I passed the table of tempting notebooks in the centre of the store. There are always tempting notebooks in The Regional Assembly. Sometimes I can resist them, but this time my eye was caught by one that was titled A Billion Random Acts of Kindness That Will Even Cheer Up a Jerk. Well. How do you resist a title like that? You don’t. Or at least I don’t. I bought it. And I immediately knew the topic of my next blog post.

Kindness. It’s a quality that feels like it’s in short supply these days – at least if you pay too much attention to the news or spend too much time on social media. Everyone seems to be yelling at everyone else or calling each other out in public. Politicians are actively working to divide us instead of bringing us together, and ginning up their “base” by behaving in stupefyingly cruel ways. Governments promulgate laws that seem expressly designed to make people’s lives harder (billionaires exempted). The notion of a “kindler, gentler” society feels very far away.  

Yet that’s not the whole story. Every day millions of people engage in quiet acts of kindness. A high school class organizes a beach clean-up. A multifaith group shows up every week to make lunch for people in need. Neighbours set up a GoFundMe campaign to help a family who lost their home in a fire. And at an even smaller scale, there are the everyday kindnesses that go almost unnoticed, except to the recipients of those acts. Something as simple as letting someone in ahead of you in traffic, cooking a meal for a sick friend, or leaving an appreciative note for a waiter along with their tip. Acts that get no publicity at all, but that can make a huge difference to someone’s day (or life).

It should be noted that being kind is not necessarily synonymous with being “nice.” Niceness is about acting to please others, usually stemming from our wish to be liked. While it can certainly be genuine, it can also be a social mask that covers up very un-nice feelings in order to be deemed acceptable. And the imperative to be nice can suppress people’s permission to address difficult issues, which not only doesn’t help anyone but is actively damaging.

Kindness, on the other hand, isn’t always nice. Nice is sitting politely with a smile on our face. Kind is speaking up about challenging issues at the risk of disturbing others. Nice is saying, “Here, let me solve this for you.” Kind is saying, “Let me help you solve it.” Nice is reflexive. Kind is responsive, and takes insight, intentionality and a willingness to extend ourselves for someone else’s benefit. Nice hopes people will be nice back. Kind doesn’t expect reward.

Also, let’s be honest: kind isn’t always easy. A website I came across the other day defines kindness as “the sincere and voluntary use of one’s time, talent, and resources to better the lives of others, one’s own life, and the world through genuine acts of love, compassion, generosity, and service.” That’s a tall order! I know that I’m still a work in progress on the kindness front and probably always will be. We probably all are. Right now I’m leaning toward a “cultivating my garden” approach: plant the seeds, water them, appreciate the shoots that appear, prune as needed, share the crop as generously as I can, and plant again when I fail.

How about you?

So I’m “stealing like an artist”, as the brilliant writer and artist Austin Kleon would put it, and creating my own newsletter containing things I find particularly interesting. I’ve dubbed it my Compendium of Delight, because I like the word “compendium” (it makes me think of a slightly dog-eared journal stuffed with cuttings and papers and snippets of collected wisdom), and I love to share things that delight me. I hope they’ll delight you too – maybe even enough to subscribe to this newsletter!

And if you’re worried about adding more weight to your already-full inbox, fear not. I’m not trying to keep to a weekly or even bi-weekly schedule. Delivery will be charmingly irregular. Kind of like Canada Post, only (hopefully) more amusing. So without further ado…

1)    I’ve finally gotten over my writer’s block enough to crank out the first blog post of my new website! Which is actually my old website, with a total makeover. I thought I was going to write a piece about my winter garden, but what came out was something else entirely. So I went with where my pen led me, and that felt right, given the ch-ch-ch-changes I’ve gone through in the past couple of years.

2)    The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) is the OG of curated delight. Its creator, Maria Popova, started it in 2006 as an email to a few friends containing things she found too interesting, inspiring or wondrous to keep to herself. Over the years, her “ledger of curiosity” expanded into a website and then a weekly newsletter whose audience has grown into the millions, including me. The Marginalian is the very model of a compendium of delight. Check out her site and see for yourself.

3)    I’m one of those people who usually has several books going on at once, and the most baffling question you can ask me is “What is your favourite book?” I mean, seriously?? How am I supposed to choose? I do have favourites in the plural, though, and I’ll share lots of them with you over time. For starters, let me give you a slim volume called Improv Wisdom, by Patricia Ryan Madson, which reminds us that life is improvisation and guides us through a series of improv maxims that will help us improvise our lives more skillfully, joyfully, and delightfully. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this book changed my life. I didn’t know it at the time, but it did.

4)    I’m a big fan of Gemma Correll, an illustrator and cartoonist who delights with her honest-yet-witty explorations of mental health issues as well as the everyday anxieties that beset us all from time to time. For example, who has not felt like this at least once? (Or – let’s be honest – at least once a day?) And I, for one, would welcome seeing these “more realistic self-help books” in an airport bookstore.

5)    People who see beauty where the rest of us see brokenness are huge sources of inspiration for me. Check out “the pavement surgeon” and just imagine finding one of these sidewalk gems on your local street. (See also kintsugi.)

6)    Music time! I plan to create a themed music playlist for each newsletter, starting with this one. It’s all about friends and it goes with my blog post, a connection you’ll understand if you read the post. But even if you don’t read the post, I hope you’ll enjoy the music!

7)    I’ll leave you with some words of wisdom from one of my favourite wise women, Rachel Naomi Remen: “Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.” That is just wow on so many levels.

8)    A photo for you from my camera (click on the image to see it larger).

Wishing you a delightful 2023!