For some of us it’s the most wonderful time of the year. If you spend time in a house crowded with relatives this week, chances are that somewhere the house a small group has gathered in front of a screen, to watch grown men throw balls or try to stop other men from throwing balls.

Millions of people take these activities as seriously as elections and wars. If you don’t, you may wonder why these professionally-performed made-up activities compel anyone at all.

From Tim Pirolli’s brilliant article in The Onion, “Professional Sports is Very Interesting”:

Whenever a ball is hit, put into a hoop, or carried to a particular point of significance, my mind instantly races to consider all of the action’s possible ramifications: “How will this affect future hittings, throwings, and carryings of other, different balls?” I wonder to myself. What a joy it is to closely follow a random group of men thrown together in one geographic location working together to win contests of athletic ability.

Although I am probably more devoted to watching inane ball-throwings on Sundays than most people are to their churches, I think the article is right on. Professional sports is exactly as ridiculous than that.

But I love it and there are of hundreds of millions like me. Non-sports people often look upon us as easily-stimulated meatheads, and some of us are, but clearly many intelligent and discerning people watch too. I will try to explain why this is so.

I’m not trying to convince anyone to watch, only explain that there is something there to get, well beyond what you might get from a three-hour action movie.

Viewed without context, yes, it is silly that anywhere on this earth there are angry young men with blades on their feet and crooked sticks in their hands, competing to fling a hardened black disc into a drape of nylon mesh. It seems sillier still that millions of dollars of infrastructure are built to house these thoroughly artificial and arbitrary competitions.

I’m not concerned by the ultimate meaninglessness of ball-throwings and trophy-hoistings any more than I am with the ultimate meaninglessness of the tides and star-circlings that constitute the natural world. If there’s some kind of beauty in their unfolding then that’s enough for me.

The ultimate inanity of the whole thing is what allows for its beauty. Because it’s a completely artificial plane of competition, there’s a fairness and transparency you don’t have when human beings compete at anything else. Each sport is a well-refined, self-contained universe governed by laws simple enough that anyone can know and understand them. Nowhere else in the human world are the goals so sharply defined and the parameters so firm. This gives the viewers and participants inside the sphere a unique clarity about what is possible, and what is truly good and bad. Read More

Quick one today. A few days ago I baked my first ever loaf of bread, and although it was flat and a bit undercooked, I knew I was entering a new era in a small aspect of life. It’s very early in this culinary expedition, but the storebought bread phase of my life seems to be over. Making my own was easy and fun and way cheaper.

In this last quarter of 2013 I’ve quickly strung together a few of these kinds of “changes to go” — the ones you can make in a short amount of time, yet can apply to the rest of your life. My sixteenth experiment is quickly turning me into a daily reader. And after struggling for years, my writing process is a lot more structured and efficient, and I think the product turns out better too.

Last week I warned against trying to do too much at once, but I’m really on a roll with personal growth and I think I can fit one more lasting improvement into 2013 before the box is sealed. I’m not worried that this one will dilute my other efforts, because it’s very simple and it takes no time at all.

Before the end of the year I want to learn to stand up straight. I have a tendency to slouch. My head just pokes forward by itself, only because that’s where the involved muscles feel most at home. There’s nothing addictive or gratifying at all about slouching, I do it only because it doesn’t occur to me to stand up straight. As soon as I do, I feel better, healthier, more confident and for some reason even a little smarter.

In cases like these all you need to make a change is a way of remembering to do a particular thing differently. My mother has reminded me to stand up straight several times a year for thirty years now, but that’s not enough.

My girlfriend offered a simple and seemingly foolproof idea for remembering to stand up straight, and it will be my seventeenth experiment. I’ll just put little stickers (the dot-shaped ones you see on the spines of library books) in places where my eyes will naturally fall throughout the day: the end of my hallway, the corner of my laptop, the tiles behind my sink. Whenever I see one I’ll remember what they’re there for and I’ll stand up straight. Soon my muscles will prefer to settle into a more upright place. Read More

The other day I sorted through five years of weekly to-do lists, which were almost identical to each other except for the date.

There were items I had been attempting to address for years, but somehow I had never actually done any of them to the point where they didn’t need to be on a list any more.

You may have experienced this familiar cycle. On a weekend, after a disappointing week, you write out a list of things you’re going to start doing, for real this time, on Monday. Working out. Practicing an instrument. Writing a bit every day. Reading a bit every day. Initiating plans with friends more often. Getting organized.

You’ve probably done a lot of each of these things at some point, even regularly for a while, yet for all their persistence in your mind they never really established themselves in your routine. You keep writing them down because you’re not prepared to let go of the idea that you will one day be fit, organized, and good at what you want to be good at.

When you’ve been writing down the same resolutions for years and they’re just not happening, two ugly possibilities may come into focus. Either these pursuits are not that important to you, or they’re too hard for you to pull off.

Chances are neither is true. The problem isn’t that they’re too hard or not important enough, it’s the opposite. They’re all perfectly doable, and we know that because other ordinary people do them. And they’re so important to us that we never put down any of them completely. We can’t accept any of these goals as optional, so we think it’s reasonable to progress a little bit with each at the same time. Just a ten minute workout every day. Just 250 words before breakfast. Reach out to one friend a week. Meditate for just five minutes.

The point is to achieve “balance”, which is a concept we seem to value even if we can’t really say why. It seems reasonable to presume that if the person you want to be does all these things, you must always be doing these things, otherwise you’ll never get there.

I think I have finally accepted that this doesn’t work. It dilutes your resolve too much. There’s never enough progress in any area to keep your enthusiasm renewed, and there’s a much greater chance of missing your standards.

It makes way more sense to keep most of your plans for improvement boxed and shelved at any given time. Pick just a few, maybe just one, to take out of the box. And do something significant with it. Read More

Every Christmas, after the initial flurry of present-opening, we’d toss all the paper into the biggest box we could find. Sometimes the cat would make a bed of it, and she seemed pretty comfortable. So when I’d walk down my back lane to learn what toys other kids got, I’d imagine gathering every family’s paper in one giant pile and jumping into it like raked-up leaves.

If the homes on our little street would have made a pile the size of a minivan, then the entire city’s paper would surely make a pile the size of a small office building. You could jump from a plane into it and be fine. Each city in Canada would contribute another building-sized pile, every year, until you had an entire city of crumpled gift wrap. The paper from the US would make it ten or twelve times larger. A decade’s worth would be unimaginable.

It occurs to me only now that the gifts that came in that paper would make an astronomically larger heap — an entire Death Star of toys and kitch, having come at a cost of about 5 trillion dollars.

Gradually I began to realize that while having new toys is a wonderful feeling, nothing was quite as wonderful as unwrapping them. The high topped out in the morning hours and wore off faster each year. By January, our family’s joy level was always about back to normal, maybe a little lower, and the decorations and ads that were still around by that time only made me sad it was over. The new stuff was still around, but it was no longer so new, and Christmas didn’t leave me with the net gain it seemed to promise. What we were really buying was the swell of awesome feelings that crested at about 9am on the 25th and then gently drained back to sea level.

The items we end up giving or getting at Christmas are usually entirely ephemeral. A typical American or Canadian has received thousands of dollars in Christmas gifts throughout his or her lifetime, and would be hard pressed to remember getting the vast majority of them, let alone tell you what those gifts are doing for them now. Ultimately they’re bought to stir up the magic and promise of Christmas, and they do, but often that’s all they do.

The bulk of consumers’ Christmas trillions is spent trying to buy an intangible thing we can call The Magic of Christmas. Some of this Magic certainly comes from outside the shopping aspect — the closeness of family, the warmth of sweaters and boozy board game sessions — but that’s the free part. The vast majority of the spending arises from chasing the ecstatic feeling of Christmas morning one felt as a child, even if you’re grown up now and only want it for your children.

The rest of the year we would call this feeling abundance. It’s not a feeling particular to Christmas, but for a lot of kids Christmas morning represents the abundance feeling at its peak concentration. The first days of Summer break gives a similar high, but it’s spread over a much longer period and so it’s never quite as dazzling. There is also a minor spike in the fall, the evening of Halloween. In each case the abundance feeling is glorious, but fades quickly.

I don’t want to dismiss the lasting meaning of this Magic, or these gift-opening experiences. Some of my best memories are of those glowing days surrounding my childhood Christmases. But the gift-receiving part was absolutely central to making those days glow for me, and I think this is true for almost every child. Experiences of abundance are intoxicating and unforgettable, and we seek them everywhere in life, but for many of us we never find them so dependably as we do at Christmas.

There are ways to create abundance that are far less costly than through traditional Christmas shopping though, and which keep it going much better. Only later in life would I start learning to get that abundant feeling from simple luxuries like walls, socks, food and visits with loved ones, and would it appear more evenly throughout the year.  Read More