Presence

A Little Ramble About My Planner, Apple Watch, and the NYT “The Morning” Email

April 25, 2026

Every day is a fresh start.

That’s what the front cover of my at-home planner says. It’s a sturdy, hard-bound book with pages for goal setting, cutesy stickers, and sections for end-of–the-month reflections where you share your favorites including a check-in section where you write “One thing I will let go of from this month” and “One thing I will embrace next month.”

Sigh.

I don’t actually use the goal setting pages the right way. I have three months of blank reflection pages for the first three months of this year, and the stickers that came along with it are mostly still attached to the sheets. Sometimes I’ll think to use one. “My Favorite!” is meant to be placed on a day when something wonderful happened. Or there are stickers that say “Messy Bun and Getting Stuff Done” or simply, “Yay!”

Yay!

Yay, yay, yay.

In spite of my crabbiness, I like this planner. It’s the second year I’ve bought it. Maybe I don’t use it the right way, but the way the days are laid out has been helpful for me. Also, the reminder that “every day is a fresh start” is a golden one. I need this daily reminder, because the days lately have been rough. One of the first things I usually do when I wake up is read my New York Times (NYT) daily email, “The Morning.” It is rare that there is not something in this that makes me want to cry. This morning’s pleasant factoids: “The Trump administration, as part of an effort to revive capital punishment, will reinstitute firing squads as an allowed form of execution.” And the acting attorney general will start pushing investigations into Trump’s adversaries “in an attempt to win his job permanently.”

Yay!

Yay, yay, yay.

Here is what I need to remember, especially when I didn’t sleep well the night before. Every day truly is a fresh start. My Apple Watch has a supposedly helpful sleep tracker, but it also sometimes can be a bit of a bully. The other night it scolded me because I went to bed too late and woke up a few times. Its verdict: I only slept “OK,” instead of “High” or “Very High” and might not have gotten the rest I needed. On a morning after a night of poor sleep, it’s important to realize that it was just one night, and tonight will be a new night for sleep. Every day is a fresh start, and every night is, too.

Also, the reminder that “every day is a fresh start” helps me in weeks when I haven’t written much. A little daily writing is good for me, for my mental and emotional health. This is one area where I’ve thankfully grown past needing to grade my daily attempts (and I’m glad my Apple Watch doesn’t evaluate me in this area!) The point with my writing is just to show up and get something on the page. There is no good or awesome or terrible or failure. Showing up is the only thing that matters.

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Presence, Security

A Hopeful Wind

April 11, 2026

A hopeful wind blew into my house from Asia this week. It brought back my daughter, who had been traveling there since early last November. She started in Bangkok, then journeyed through Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and finally back to Thailand. Along the way she volunteered at an elephant sanctuary, supported families through homestays in villages, earned her scuba diving certification, climbed rocks, kayaked, and learned.

She told me that in Vietnam, they call the war the “American War.” She toured caves in Laos and Vietnam where citizens survived during the war years. She saw the Killing Fields in Cambodia, where thousands of people were brutally murdered. She went to a visitor center in Cambodia and met “hero rats,” animals that are still being trained today to help clear the country from unexploded landmines (and the rats are not harmed because they don’t weigh enough to trigger the bombs).

With a retired hero rat in Cambodia

She graduated from college in 2023 with a degree in environmental science and two minors—one in conservation biology and another in community engagement and social change. She did the things she thought she was supposed to do right after graduation: she went to Oregon and had a paid internship collecting and studying butterflies with Pacific University. After that, she landed a job working with sea turtles in Costa Rica. She was just about the only one on her research team who only had a bachelor’s degree. Everyone else was working for master’s degrees or already had one.

 

That was when she started to realize something. The Costa Rica job paid for her airline flights and also provided room and board. That was all, though. There wasn’t any salary associated with it—and it was hard work. Sea turtles lay their eggs at nighttime, so the job included monitoring long stretches of beach with a partner, often for hours at a time. Sleep was often difficult. I had a chance to visit her and her team, and I walked along with her one night for turtle patrol. It was exhausting.

It was good work, important work, but if most of her teammates held master’s degrees and were still basically only earning room and board, what did that say about her plan, her dream, of continuing her education at the master’s level?

When she got home from Costa Rica, she found a summer, in-between kind of job, working as a zip line operator at Heavenly Valley resort, up in Tahoe. That job included a discounted rate for shared employee housing. Whoever would have guessed that adding “zip line guide” to a resume would be helpful in finding future employment? It worked for her, since last summer she went to Catalina Island and was a zip line guide there.

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