Good morning. I’m delighted to tell you about my new project: The Good List, a weekly newsletter designed to bring joy and meaning to your days. I explain what it’s all about below, and you can sign up here to get it sent to your inbox on Wednesday afternoons. (Fret not! I’ll still be here on Saturday mornings.) — Melissa
What’s good?I want to be a person who’s keeping good records, who’s not letting the events of my life pass without memorializing them. But regular journaling often feels like busy work. Which is why I prefer a list. A list is lighter, more accessible — dare I say more fun? A simple record of things I want to remember: clothes I wore, people I saw, what was on my mind. Lists are a tool to make sense of the world. We’re all (too) familiar with the to-do list, the grocery list, the bucket list: stuff meant to be crossed off and dispensed with. I also like keeping lists as archives (say, a compilation of Movies I Watched This Month), as celebrations (Favorite Breakfasts This Year), as reflections (Things I Worried About That Never Came to Pass). When I’m overwhelmed, I make a list of everything that’s bothering me. I’ve made lists of funny things people said last night at dinner, the books that shaped me, the sweetest dogs I’ve met. Once you have a list, you can often see order in what seemed like chaos when it was running around off-leash in your brain. We’re surrounded by “best” lists, and they have their place (thank you, best books and films of the 21st century). But I prefer a “good” list. In a world of bests, good is a relief. Best invites an argument; good is just a suggestion: Here is this thing. I think you’ll probably like it. Good is generous: This is one good thing; others welcome. You want to spend time with good. It says, Look, I am not making any claims to being the one and only. I’m not promising forever. Let’s hang out and see where this goes. I keep a good list because I know how much easier it is to complain or despair over what’s bad, what’s missing, what we wish were different. And let’s be clear: There’s plenty to be sad or cross or dissatisfied about. We shouldn’t stop wrestling with those things or trying to change them when we can. But there’s got to be more. A similar principle animates “Every Brilliant Thing,” an interactive play now starring Daniel Radcliffe on Broadway — our critic Helen Shaw described it as “an openhearted show about naming and noticing the good.” I used to think it was silly or sappy to write down the things that I love. But once you start doing it, once you start deliberately taking time out of your day to write down things that are good, you start noticing them everywhere. This week: The surprisingly refreshing Arnold Palmer in a can that I had with lunch. Jim Broadbent’s restrained, big-hearted performance in the 2010 Mike Leigh film “Another Year,” which I just watched. The way my green sweater looked with the black and white striped shirt. The song “Something’s Going On,” by Lambchop. Tiny things, but they each brought a little bit of joy into my life. Once you start tracking what’s good, you notice you feel good. Not all the time. Not so much that you lose your edge. But enough that you start to feel a little more balanced. If we want to be happy — a state that’s become so overhyped and overanalyzed as to become almost meaningless, but stay with me — we need to orient ourselves toward the good. I’ve been doing a bit of this here in The Morning on Saturdays for the past four years. And now we’ve decided to expand the franchise. Starting Wednesday, I’ll be making my good lists public in a new weekly newsletter. The Good List will provide exactly what it says on the tin: a list of good things. It won’t be a Pollyanna’s bright-siding of a bad situation — regular readers know me better than that — but, rather, a cleareyed accounting of the very serious business of cataloging some reasons we’re lucky to be alive right now. The first edition contains a poet’s intentions for March, a delightful typewriter experiment and a secret flower of spring. It’s not a ranking, just a tidy way of organizing disparate elements that share one important quality: They are, broadly speaking, good. The Good List is, finally, an invitation, extended with both confidence and humility: What things have you found that are validating, life-affirming, mind-opening, satisfying? This is a project of addition rather than elimination. It’s a conversation: The thing I love and the thing you love can sit side by side, and so from time to time, we’ll include your submissions in the List. Looking for the good is an eternal pursuit — and that’s exactly the point. Sign up here to get The Good List sent to your inbox — and, if you please, share this with those who could use a little good in their lives.
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