⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🪤 The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me. Read it here.

❤️‍🔥 The 1 Emotional Processing Technique We Recommend Everyone Do: Your behavior is driven by emotions you don't even know you're avoiding. Try it here.

꩜ How To Escape The Shame Cycle: Leave bad habits behind, stay consistent with good ones, make every day worth living. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

Tom Kūaliʻi Photography: “So many opportunities during Episode 28 eruption to capture the Koa'e kea flying all over the lava fountain. Definitely a challenge and tried different techniques. This one is called "Messenger" and will be displayed at this year's "MANA" show.” Watch the video too.

📹 Time Travel Via Video​

After my grandmother died, I spent time sifting through old videotapes to see if I could come across any footage of her. I found some when I was a very young child and it instantly stirred up a cocktail of grief and gratitude.​

Watching these old videos felt like a form of non-participatory time travel. I was trapped behind a glass window so I couldn't interact or interferre with what was unfolding but I was able to witness it all over again.

I was able to revisit these mundane moments that at the time held no special significance. Because cameras have become so ubiquitous I think we've grown a bit too accustomed to their magic.

They are reality freezing machines allowing us to teleport back to a moment or a series of moments in time. The footage remains the same but the eyes viewing it change because the significance of what was captured transforms as life proceeds and things are lost.​

So I'd offer you a reminder that today is a good time to anticipate endings and goodbyes. Not to increase worry but to enhance appreciation. Find a random moment in the day with the people you love and capture it on video.

Things will not always be this way and someday having the option to travel back into a small segment of what's here now could mean the world to you.

🏁 For a new beginning

Sink your spirit into this piece by John O’Donohue:

🤓 Learn This Word

Sophrosyne: A Greek word referring to a healthy state of mind, characterized by self-control, moderation, and a deep awareness of one's true self, and resulting in one's true happiness.

🕸️ From Around The Web

The Science of Wonder

“On a blustery January say in 2019, I looked at my iPhone on my gym bag. Two texts.

From my brother’s wife, Kim:
Can you come here as fast as possible?
Fifteen minutes later from my mom:
It’s over. Rolf took the cocktail. He is leaving us.

Rolf is my younger brother, born a year after me in a small clinic in Jalisco, Mexico. The “cocktail” was the end of-life opiates he took, which usually ends a human life in an hour or two.

I picked up my wife, Mollie, and our daughters, Natalie and Serafina, in Berkeley, then my mom in Sacramento. We arrived at Rolf and Kim’s home in the foothills of the Sierras at 10:00 p.m.

Rolf was in a bed downstairs, lying on his stomach and right cheek, his head tilted upward. My dad held his foot. I leaned in near his midsection. My mom stroked his thin hair.

Rolf’s face was full and flushed. The sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks caused by colon cancer were gone; the tightened skin around his mouth smoothed. His lips curled upward at the corners.

I rested my right hand on his left shoulder, a rounded protrusion of bone. I held it the way I would the smooth granite stones we used to find near the rivers we swam in as young brothers.”

[Continue Reading]