Slow it all down
Recommendations for meditation, journaling, and art.
This week is about slowing things down.
It’s been a tough few months for me (and for you, I bet). My life has felt like a Super Mario level, propulsive and tenuous, the ground below me blinking in and out of existence, the only option to keep scrambling and lunging to the right. Player, please press pause.
That’s how I’ve been using tech lately — to pause. I want to share some recommendations around meditation, journalling, and art — three rituals that have been like flotsam to me, small islands to cling to in a roiling sea.
As for the discourse, I need a break. All I’ll say this week about AI is that Ezra Klein’s take was probably the best. But for now goodbye to all that.
LETTER OF REC: Daily meditations with Headspace
Grief can be a lot of things and right now, for me, it’s a kind of labyrinth. There’s no escaping the maze, but I’ve fashioned a ball of yarn from meditation.
My friend put me onto Headspace’s guided courses. Years ago I used Headspace to treat my insomnia, rather successfully, and I still use what I’ve learned. In the years since, they’ve developed a library of guided courses, which spans topics like illness, acceptance, and gratitude. I added the grief course to my mo(u)rning routine, and it’s been a godsend.
I don’t understand how meditation works, but I’ve found it helps me experience time and mind in new ways. When I’m meditating, I can feel time expand and contract and I can feel my mind speed slow. Meditation creates a stillness that feels safe, a cocoon from which to meet and greet my darker thoughts — and one I can come back to almost any time. It’s a wondrous thing.
I recommend starting a course with a friend. I’ve really enjoyed having an accountability buddy with whom to debrief the experience. I’d also recommend adding some ritual to the ritual. My bean bag chair is now reserved exclusively for daily meditations.
While I’m here, I’ll share a few product observations. Courses are a smart feature. I appreciate the sense of guidance and momentum they provide. They’re also a good way to onboard new subscribers to the product. I love the lightweight “community thoughts” feature, which functions as a guestbook of sorts. People post short messages — what they’re grieving, how they’re doing — that feel profound. You remember that so many experiences are simply universal.
LETTER OF REC: Keep a gratitude journal
Whereas meditation is an exercise in metacognition, journaling is a more tactical unpacking of the everyday. If you’re new to it, I recommend starting with a single prompt you can answer every day (things you’re grateful for, moments of joy, things that excite you, etc.). I’ve been doing gratitude. There are days when even one thing feels beyond reach, but I’ve found that once I start rooting around, I end up with a much longer list. Gratitude begets more gratitude.
The Notes app works great, though I’ve been enjoying Apple’s new Journal app (available in iOS 17). The app solves two pain points: privacy and inspiration. W/r/t the former, the app demands Face ID every time you open it, the digital equivalent of a journal lock. And it assures you everything is encrypted and stored locally. (In a funny moment of synchronicity, the teenagers next to me are venting about creating ciphers for their diaries at home.)
The big innovation here is around inspiration. The app mines your phone’s memory for Moments — photos, workouts, walks, etc. — and then offers those as starting points. It’s useful, and and a little worrying, as the Verge points out. It turns out our phones know a hell of a lot about us.
What’s interesting about this feature is that you can see your life reflected back to you without self-curation getting in the way. There’s a gulf between what happened and what you remembered — what you did and how it felt — and this practice has helped collapse it. When I look back, I’m consistently surprised by how much I missed, how much there is to be thankful for. It’s a boon when you’re in crisis.
LETTER OF REC: Plan an art day with SeeSaw
The last thing I do when I need a break is see art. A friend recommended this really great app, SeeSaw, to plan my gallery day. It’s a simple app that does this one thing very well. To plan you trip, you start with a neighborhood. You can scroll through current shows, pick the ones you want, and then they all get populated in a map. That’s it! The one catch it only works for five cities at the moment: LA, NY, London, Paris, and Berlin.
Here I am, happy as a clam, with an old friend at the must-see Dana Schutz show.
So there you have it. Three ways to cope and rest and pause. You can’t stop time’s arrow, but maybe you can slow it. —Michael
This felt like a breath of fresh air this post-Thanksgiving Monday morning, thank you. Now BRB gotta download Headspace
Lovely read and a reminder for me to take it slow. A few months later, do you find yourself still using the Journal app in iOS? Played around with it, but still have some hesitations in regards to lack of data capturing -- maybe that's a good thing!