5 fun things

Finally my first Monday free from school! In case you wondering, school Mondays usually emails ad nauseum from the oh-so-horrifying 2.5 days of not answering anything, class prep, eternal grading, online class updates, and meetings all hanging over my head in one giant bundle ready to burst. And these mornings always come with a very hefty side of that perpetual struggle to retrieve enough energy to ignore those dependable Monday blues. 

I think this is a good week to start the following project for Monday mornings: 5 nice things. 

For this weekend, it is: 

• the silver lining of Covid that is granting me a full semester of maternity leave, and removing that Monday heaviness until late August
• Deutsche Advents traditions and baking cookies for holiday gifts, wishing I could share them with family more than friends and colleagues 
• the warmth of luxury Deutsche Federdecken when it gets down to 1 degree outside. 
• the thrill of finding gently used items for the little poppy seed online for 1/4 the price
• being able to stay home in the woods during a pandemic

The origin of 5 nice things
Writer Siobhan O’Connor and her friend Anna made up a game called Five Nice Things. At dinner, they simply take turns naming things that are nice. 

“It can be a thing that makes you happy, a compliment for the other person, a win at work, ‘This broccoli is tasty,’ whatever,” writes Siobhan. “It’s a bit sappy, but it’s not the sappiest, and the rules were: Don’t overthink it, and be specific. We’d roll it out in other settings: group hangs, work, what-not. It was, generally speaking, a hit. Even Eeyores can get into it if you bring to the game your Tigger energy. But it was most meaningful when it was just the two of us.
We named the game, but we didn’t invent it, obviously. It’s just a less-corny name for a gratitude exercise, which is a practice as old as the Buddha. The game has the power to knock out a temporary funk. Or a big one. There seems to be some science to support this."

What are your five things?

via {cup of jo}