If you’re going to ask someone to check, “Is this even?” or, “Is this fair?” or “Is this level?” … you’d better make sure you agree about what’s even, fair, and level.

And there’s almost always some margin of error. Better make sure you’re on the same page about that, too.

Celebrate someone you love.

You can wait until a birthday. Or a special occasion. Or just the right moment.

But you don’t have to.

You can celebrate now. You can voice your gratitude now. You can show your appreciation now.

Whether it’s quiet and private or jubilant and public … put words and actions to what is in your heart.

Don’t wait to do it. Celebrate now.

Remember: learning to pronounce the words is not the goal.

The goal is to sing. Not just to say the words, but to sing them.

Don’t get so caught up in the saying that you forget about the singing.

(This notion can be applied as broadly as you’d like.)

Life doesn’t have a GPS whose voice announces, “You’ve arrived at your destination.” So there are times we may wonder, “Have I arrived? Am I in the right place?”

Only we can answer those questions — and we must be patient with ourselves.

But while we wait for the answers, we can live the questions.

And whether we’ve arrived or not, we can appreciate the concept of “you are here.” That much is always true.

For the past two weeks, I’ve had a friendly wrestling match with a piece of piano sheet music. (My sight reading is woefully novice.) I’m learning a lot from committing to learning the notes as the composer has written them.

Of the many takeaways, here’s one: it’s often the notes beside the expected notes that open up a sound. A slight shift up or down the keyboard and the voices take on new shapes and new depth.

It’s this way with many things. Sounds, flavors, colors, shapes … Just a slight, skillfully intentional shift and everything becomes richer and more beautiful.

Stop worrying about your “best by” date.

You’re good until you expire — and there’s no set date for that.

Not cooking lessons. That’s when someone teaches you to cook.

Cooking learnings: things you learn while you cook.

In a recipe, the word “meanwhile” causes me a little anxiety. The more meanwhiles, the more anxiety.

It’s because meanwhile means that you have to do more than one thing at a time. Get one thing started, then move on to another, but don’t forget about the first thing. Add another meanwhile, and now you have three things to monitor.

It turns out, life has a lot of meanwhiles. That’s perhaps why life can be so challenging: all the meanwhiles.

Another learning: the cleanup sometimes takes longer than the cooking.

It’s this way with a lot of creative activity. The cleanup can be extensive — and it’s just as much part of the work.

Which also means that if you’re the one cleaning up, you’re doing important work in service of creativity (even if it’s your own).

The human body is never at rest.

Even when we’re settled. Even when we’re still. Our blood flows. Our chest rises and falls. Our synapses fire. Our physical selves persist.

We are restless creatures.

How are you harnessing that restlessness today?

Toward what worthy cause are you directing it?

Of the many things art can do, it can ask us to pause with wonder and awe.

The Lightning Field by Walter de Maria — a sculpture meant to be walked, viewed, and experienced — is an arrangement of 400 stainless steel poles, each over 20 feet in height, spread in a grid across a square mile of western New Mexico desert.

With or without lightning, the installation calls viewers to experience and appreciate nature in a new way.

Like many great works of art, it asks us questions and allows us to find our own answers — or to just sit quietly with the questions.

Even without traveling to New Mexico, perhaps just knowing about The Lightning Field will help us to pause with a different kind of reverence the next time we see a streak of electricity spanning the sky.

Sometimes complex problems arise because we’ve overlooked simple things.

Dehydration is a good example.

It’s plain enough to seem trivial: drink enough water. But when this doesn’t happen — through oversight or lack — it leads to an imbalanced body, an imbalanced mind, and all the things that can follow from those imbalances.

Don’t underestimate the power of satisfying basic needs and the possibility for there to be simple solutions.

And stay hydrated, friends.

A friend of mine has put on a few pounds. (He’d like to lose 20 or 30 of them.)

He joked with me saying, “At my current weight, I could just tell people, ‘I recently lost 100 lbs,’ and they’d all say, ‘Wow! Way to go. You look great!’”

People tend to praise us based on where they think we’ve been and where they think we’re going — often more than where we are right now.

Perceived direction has a lot of influence on our perspective.

This excerpt is from a Sculpture Magazine interview. Ann Landi asks artist Bonnie Collura, “How did you go from traditional welding to working with so many diverse materials?”

I love Bonnie’s explanation.

“That was … a result of good teaching. I was a real metal head. I learned how to weld at VCU. When I was a junior, one of my teachers said, ‘You’re getting pretty close to graduating, you need to learn how to build in other ways because you might not have the money to work with metals.’ I thought I should follow that advice, so I ventured into the hardware store and bought what I could afford—sheets of polystyrene foam. I cut it thin with a bandsaw and tried to bend it just as one would heat-form steel. Instead of welding, I used duct tape to hold it all together. That helped me become more autonomous because I could build within my means, which has been a godsend when I’ve been low on funds, and it helps when I have to teach students how to build something ambitious without spending a lot of money.”

Build within your means. Be ambitious amidst constraint. Find a way.

Such good lessons. Thanks, Bonnie.

You don’t need eyes to see and you don’t need ears to hear.

And conversely, there are many with eyes and ears who remain blind and deaf.

It turns out, what we see and hear is often by choice.

You can ship with self-doubt.

You can publish with self-doubt.

You can even present with self-doubt.

We like to feel confident — and sometimes that’s the goal — but it’s not a prerequisite.

Good to keep in mind, too, that we don’t always recognize the value of our own work. What we’ve deemed mediocre might just be brilliant … if we’d give it a chance to be seen.

Thoughts do not always arrive fully formed.

Sometimes they’re just a whisper of an idea.

Or the inversion of one.

Or its cousin.

Some are like a sturdy puzzle that needs solving.

Others are a tender seedling that needs gentle care.

Either way, be patient. The thoughts are there for a reason — even if they’re young and incomplete.

Give them time.

I read about a man who surprised his anesthesiologist.

When people initially come out of sedation, they can be emotionally uninhibited. Some people cry. Some are moody. Some are agitated or even angry.

But this man began to sing.

A kind, gentle, and contented soul it must be — to sing when all the filters are stripped away.

What a beautiful thought.

“A … or B? One … or two?”

An eye exam gives us real-time choices between two options.

We’re quite comfortable making the choice when it’s clear. We don’t choose the worse option. We go with what’s better.

But we’re not as skillful when it comes to slower assessments.

Consider comparing two months with any of these criteria:

• One with caffeine. One without.

• One with social media. One without.

• One with adequate sleep. One without.

• One with vitamin supplements. One without.

• One with daily exercise. One without.

• One with a mediation practice. One without.

Are we patient enough to test? Are we sensible enough — upon learning which is better — to choose the better option?

There’s one way to find out.

Parents help troubleshoot kids’ computers. Friends help with algebra equations. Colleagues help decipher new policy memos.

You might not be an industry expert, but you’re somebody’s expert.

* * *

We all can be helpers. Embrace that role. It’s important … and we’ve all been cast to play the part.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep. My body can feel it. My brain can feel it.

Last night, at a reasonable hour, I shut the lid of my laptop and got ready for bed. All projects: paused. No further progress.

But today, I’m still tired. How disappointing! I slept more than I’ve slept in a week. Where are the results?

And of course, I realize that one night of reasonable sleep does not make up for a week of poor sleep habits. It will take another night of correction, and another, and another. Maybe some other adjustments too.

We often reach for the quick fixes to problems that have developed over long periods of time. Sometimes a quick fix will work, but most of the time it takes repeated efforts.

Here’s wishing you luck in your own repetitions.

Your expectation of the future — your predictions and assumptions — will be inaccurate.

Five years. Ten. Twenty. The further you go, the further the drift.

Alive and passed, married and divorced, where people work, where people live, what people do … it’s all subject to change.

So when we find ourselves in a moment where our expectations don’t align with reality — for better or worse — we have to remind ourselves that we we’ve never been good at predicting the future.

But we are good at being flexible. At adapting. At finding a way — and finding joy and contentment — even when our predictions were way off.

Sometimes, thankfully, they’re way off for the better.