{"id":12280,"date":"2025-07-26T03:56:13","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T03:56:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=12280"},"modified":"2025-07-26T03:56:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T03:56:13","slug":"an-easy-summer-project-worth-doing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/?p=12280","title":{"rendered":"An easy summer project worth doing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<\/p>\n<p data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and ros\u00e9. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad. Real life is rarely as sunny and sparkly and juicy as vacation life. Right away, I found myself wishing that I could somehow preserve those delicious vacation morsels and store them in my cheeks like a chipmunk preparing for winter. Which is when I remembered something important: my own free will. What was stopping me from replicating the joy of vacation in my regular life?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">So began my quest to do things differently. Call it \u201cromanticizing my life,\u201d if you want. Or call it self-care\u2014actually, please don\u2019t. But soon after returning from my trip, I was living more intentionally than I had before. I was searching for things to savor. I woke up early(ish) and started my day with a slow, luxurious stretch. In the evenings, rather than melting into the couch with the remote, I turned off my phone, made a lime-and-bitters mocktail, and read physical books\u2014only fiction allowed. Less virtuously, I bought things: a towel that promised to cradle me in soft fibers, a new Sharpie gel pen, a funny little French plate that said <em><span class=\"smallcaps\">Fromage<\/span><\/em> in red cursive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">The effort was not a complete success. Replicating the exact feeling of holiday weightlessness is impossible; the demands of work and life always tend to interfere. But I did discover that these small changes were making my daily life, on average, a teensy bit happier. Someone once said that you should do something every day that scares you, and I\u2019m sure those words\u00a0 have galvanized many powerful people to action. But regular life is frightening enough. What if we sought out daily moments of joy instead?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">I asked some of my colleagues how they create their own tiny moments of delight. Here are a few of their answers:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"\">\n<li>Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig wakes up and starts working the group chats, sending a \u201cRise n\u2019 grind\u201d to her girlfriends and a \u201cGoooooood morning lads\u201d to her passel of politics-chat guys. \u201cIt\u2019s like starting the day by going to a party with all my friends,\u201d she told me. \u201cInstantly puts me in a good mood.\u201d On the flip side, Ellen Cushing is working on texting less and calling more. She now talks with her oldest friend, who lives far away, almost every weekday\u2014sometimes for an hour, other times for five minutes. Their conversations, which aren\u2019t scheduled, involve two simple rules: You pick up the call if you can, and you hang up whenever you need to.<\/li>\n<li>Senior editor Vann Newkirk tends to his many indoor plants: a fiddle-leaf fig, a proliferation of spider plants, a pothos, a monstera, a couple of peace lilies, some different calatheas, an African violet, a peperomia, and a ponytail palm. \u201cEven on no-water days, I like to check on them,\u201d he told me, and \u201cwrite little notes about how they are growing or where they grow best.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>For a while, Shane Harris, a staff writer on the Politics team, began each day by reading a poem from David Whyte\u2019s Everything Is Waiting for You. The purpose \u201cwas to gently wake up my mind and my imagination, before I started writing,\u201d he told me. \u201cIt\u2019s such a better ritual than reading the news.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Staff writer Annie Lowrey decompresses her spine(!) at night, which, she told me, involves bending over to hang like a rag doll, or dead-hanging from a pull-up bar: \u201cIt\u2019s the best.\u201d She also journals every morning about the things that she\u2019s thankful for, and prays in gratitude for achieving difficult feats. \u201cMaybe you accepted a vulnerability and your ability to handle it? Maybe you realized you could celebrate someone else\u2019s success rather than wishing it were your own?\u201d she said. It\u2019s annoying when the \u201cobvious advice,\u201d such as drinking more water and getting more sleep, is right, she said. But gratitude is, unsurprisingly, good for your mood and mental health.<\/li>\n<li>Isabel Fattal, my lovely editor for this newsletter, curates playlists for her morning and evening commutes\u2014which are based less on genre or Spotify\u2019s suggestions than on the kind of mood she\u2019d like to be in at that point in the day. \u201cWhen I was a college intern in New York, I once managed to go seven stops in the wrong direction on the subway because I was listening to the National (I had a lot of feelings in that era),\u201d she told me. \u201cI\u2019ve since improved my spatial awareness, but I maintain that the right music can elevate any experience.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul class=\"\">\n<li>If you have kids, you can include them in your happiness project, as many of my staff-writer friends do. Ross Andersen, for example, has enlisted his kids to make him a cappuccino every morning, which is genius and perhaps also a violation of child-labor laws. Clint Smith and his son spent a summer watching highlights from a different World Cup every day, which, he told me, was \u201ca fun way to grow together in our joint fandom and also was a pretty fun geography lesson.\u201d And McKay Coppins told me he loves his 2-year-old\u2019s bedtime routine, which involves a monster-robot game, Mister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood, and a good-night prayer. \u201cBedtime can be notoriously stressful for parents of young kids\u2014and it often is for me too!\u201d McKay told me. \u201cBut I always end up looking forward to this little slice of my day.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Related:<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"ArticleHeading_root__WKbPJ ArticleHeading_hed1__1gTi1\">Today\u2019s News<\/h2>\n<ol class=\"\">\n<li>A shooting at a University of New Mexico dorm left one person dead and another wounded. Law enforcement is searching for the suspect.<\/li>\n<li>Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the \u201clargesse\u201d of the Fed\u2019s headquarters renovations, just a day after President Donald Trump appeared to ease tensions during a visit to the Federal Reserve.<\/li>\n<li>The Trump administration will release $5.5 billion in frozen education funds to support teacher training and recruitment, English-language learners, and arts programs ahead of the new school year.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">More From <em>The Atlantic<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\"><strong>Evening Read<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Edward Bottomley \/ Getty; Dario Belingheri \/ Getty.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Science Is Winning the Tour de France<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">By Matt Seaton<\/p>\n<p>For fans of the Tour de France, the word extraterrestrial has a special resonance\u2014and not a fun, Spielbergian one. In 1999 the French sports newspaper L\u2019\u00c9quipe ran a photo of Lance Armstrong on its front page, accompanied by the headline \u201cOn Another Planet.\u201d This was not, in fact, complimenting the American athlete for an out-of-this-world performance in cycling\u2019s premier race, but was code for \u201che\u2019s cheating.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At that point, L\u2019\u00c9quipe\u2019s dog-whistling accusation of doping was based on mere rumor. More than a decade passed before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency declared Armstrong guilty of doping. His remarkable streak of seven Tour wins was wiped from the record, but misgivings about extraterrestrial performances have never left the event.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Read the full article.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Culture Break<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">See. Check out these photos of the week from an animal shelter in Colombia, a mountain church service in Germany, a memorial to Ozzy Osbourne in England, the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, and much more.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Examine. Hulk Hogan embodied the role of larger-than-life pro-wrestling hero with unwavering showmanship, even as controversy and complexity shadowed his legacy, Jeremy Gordon writes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Play our daily crossword.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\">Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ArticleParagraph_root__4mszW\" data-flatplan-paragraph=\"true\"><em>When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting <\/em>The Atlantic<em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12281,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[5293,370,111,4714],"class_list":{"0":"post-12280","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-easy","9":"tag-project","10":"tag-summer","11":"tag-worth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}