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A final goodbye
Today, I visited a friend in palliative care. I was joined by three other friends, and the shared presence made the trip feel lighter. We talked to each other and his family in his hospital room. Our friend’s eyes were closed, and he didn’t respond to our comments. He seemed to be sleeping. He looked…
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Five minutes ahead
The clock in my study runs five minutes ahead. My partner and I set it this way in the hopes of constantly being five minutes early, which is exactly what happened the other day. This happens to be a tradition in both of our families. When I grew up, the clock in my family’s living…
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Learning Chinese again
When my parents decided to immigrate from Hong Kong to Canada, there was a system-level consequence: their future child was going to grow up speaking English, soaking up North American culture, and living a Canadian lifestyle. Saturday morning cartoons were part of this culture and lifestyle, but my parents had other ideas. Instead of letting…
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Shape your projects and tasks
Shorten how long it takes. It’s easier to convince yourself to do a five minute task, than it is to do a thirty minute one. You can outpace procrastination. Shrink it. Small projects and tasks look more approachable than big ones. Simplify it. The more straightforward it is, with fewer steps to follow through the…
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Learning fast vs. learning with your heart
When you’re a child, you have a superpower: you learn incredibly quickly. You soak knowledge up like a sponge. The only condition is that your heart needs to be in it. (This is known as enrollment.) This turns out to matter a lot, because you’re not always in control; you haven’t learned to trick yourself…
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Define your creative surfaces
One of the prompts in Creative Doing is Set Up Surfaces, which suggests that you create new places to store or publish your work. “Set up at least three different surfaces—one for storing your works in progress, one for sending to other people for feedback, and one for displaying your finished work,” I write. I…