​
​Friday Inspiration 514​
​

I was not prepared to learn so much about the human body when I started watching this new-to-me video about why kids don’t get cold as easily as adults do. But if you have five minutes to watch this, prepare to be armed with several pieces of information that will make you sound really smart. (video)

I linked to this series in December 2024, and totally forgot about it until the emails for this year's series started popping up in my inbox again this December. There are still 12 days of it left, each one an essay on the topic “I thought about that a lot,” written anonymously and published once a day. Here’s a bit from the December 9 essay, “In 2025, I thought a lot about my body in numbers”: “What I’ve learnt is that I didn’t need extraordinary willpower. Just the steady motivation of wanting to feel better, and the awareness of what was at stake if I didn’t.”

I’ve loved having Janji as a newsletter sponsor in 2025, and really enjoyed trying out different pieces of gear as the seasons change, and my routine changes. Recently, I added in some strength training a couple times a week at the gym near our house, and I am happy to report that I have not injured myself yet (probably due to my very cautious approach to increasing weight/resistance). And of course I run to the gym, and run home. I’ve been wearing the Janji Circa Daily Tee, which is a blend of cotton, polyester, modal, and spandex, that I’ve worn for running, casual wear, and now to do barbell squats. The short-sleeve versions are pretty much sold out (so I’m not wrong!) but several colors are still available in the women’s long-sleeve version and the men’s long-sleeve version.

I am a huge fan of Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird,” one of my favorite books about how to write, and I saw this note by her pop up on Substack, read the first line and thought, “Fuckin Anne Lamott. Why is she always so right?”

This is probably more for people who have read a book to an infant or toddler in the recent past, but I was laughing out loud at Jae Towle Vieira’s writing in this Defector piece, “Here Is What Reading To My Child Has Done To My Brain,” commenting on the slight and not-so-slight absurdities in children’s books. Such as: “Before I had a kid, I questioned the need for the abundance of Wheels on the Bus variations. Now I understand that there is no upper limit to the ideal amount of things that could happen in threes on buses. All day long, all through the town—a la Speed, it doesn’t matter what we’re doing as long as the bus keeps going.” [GIFT LINK]

Like every other social media platform, Reddit often feeds me stuff I would have been better off not seeing, but I feel the most in-control of my feed there, so I keep going back, and often the local Missoula subreddit provides me with actual useful information (new restaurant/power outage/warning about something), or just a laugh—like when someone posted a photo of this tree that’s in one of our local nature areas and asked if it had a name. And now of course every time I go for a walk there, I’ll say, “There’s ol’ Don Quattro.”

We are very close to announcing the dates and location for my 2026 Freeflow Institute writing + trail running workshop, so my friend/Freeflow Institute founder Chandra Brown having been talking a lot of logistics lately, and somehow she did not mention this story she wrote for The Guardian about what happened to the body of a 40-ton whale that washed up on a beach in Anchorage in November 2024, and the guy who was determined to get it off the beach and into a museum. (and yes, the exploding whale of Florence, Oregon is mentioned in the story)

This essay is a few months old, but I found it after reading another piece the author published recently, and the headline “The slow death of firsthand experience” pulled me in. It gave me a lot to think about, and I realized I have wondered something similar, but as it relates to online writing, i.e. how much online writing is just reacting to or interpreting things or thinking about things, vs. telling about an actual experience (or even just making an actual real-world, non-screen-time experience part of an essay about something).

--