Something Good #5
discipline as freedom, natural egg dyes, a joke
Hi, I'm Nina Iordanova and this is the 5th edition of Something Good, a newsletter designed for your 🧠, 🖐, and ❤️. Coming your way every two weeks, I hope you find something good here.
I used to exercise religiously at the start of last year. Every day for at least 45 minutes, preferably an hour.
It was easy because it was fun, and because I’d decided it was a non-negotiable part of my morning.
I’d wake up. I’d brush my teeth. I’d roll out my yoga mat and get to it. It wasn’t something I had to think about or that took up any mental space.
A lot of the time, choice can mean freedom. It means deciding what you want to do, when you want to do it, and how.
But it can also be a burden.
The moment I decided to “be more flexible” with my exercise schedule, I stopped doing it. I was now thinking about whether I wanted to exercise or not every single morning, but not always doing it.
I found myself falling into the same trap with other things like WhatsApp messages and emails. Things that felt like they demanded your attention and a response the second they came in.
I thought that making a choice about when I wanted to respond to those messages would give me more freedom, but it meant I constantly had a dozen small tasks on my mind. Rather than freeing up mental space, they took exponentially more.
So I’m back to experimenting with taking those choices away and relying on rules instead.
Exercise every morning for 30 minutes.
Get back to messages within 48 hours.
Because sometimes, discipline can mean freedom too.
This caught my eye
🔮 The Magicians (TV show). Do you LOVE shows about magic schools the way that I do? Probably not, and that’s for the best. This show has all the greatest parts of the magic school genre while simultaneously making fun of every single fantasy trope. It’s dark, it’s funny, it gets really messed up, and it’s never quite what you expect it to be. Stick it out through the first season and you’ll find a show that’s different from anything else you’ve seen. Great for fans of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.
[Thanks James D. for the recommendation!]
🍭 @IFYOUHIGH. You can be high or not, these are all awesome. Cool mind-bending videos, sometimes colourful, sometimes just interesting to look at.
🍌 Bananas Foster Upside-Down Cake. I found this recipe a day after I threw out 3 bananas, so this is my way of repenting. Put your bananas to better use than I did. He’s also got a great account at @dennistheprescott where every meal is an absolute feast.
⚡️Don’t organize your to-dos by project, organize them by mental state. I come back to this every few months for a refresher. “When it comes to doing a high volume of creative work with ease, mental state is critically important…The better you can manage your mental energy, the better the insights you’ll have, and the more easily you’ll stay on track. If you organize your tasks according to mental state, you can focus more deeply on the task at hand, and prevent getting distracted when switching tasks.”
Things my mother taught me
Easter has always been a big holiday in my household, at least for my mom and I. There’s a day devoted to baking and a day devoted to painting eggs.
On the recipe list we have three traditional things that we make:
Kozunak (close to brioche bread)
Korabii (kind of like little dense scones)
Kifli (imagine not-flaky croissants)
It’s a whole day of mixing and kneading and shaping, with a conveyer belt of trays going in and out of the oven every 30 minutes.
The kitchen counter is covered with balls of dough, the dinner table has wire racks full of pastries cooling off, and the coffee table is where they go to be packed away into ginormous Tupperware containers.
Extra kozunak, korabii, and kifli are distributed to friends, neighbours, and people at work, and we still have enough left to last into summer.
The egg painting would start the next day.
I remember being jealous of family friends who would paint eggs with store-bought dye. They’d end up with baskets of eggs in the richest shades of blue, red, green, and yellow. They looked like little gems.
My mom insisted on painting our Easter eggs with natural dyes so that even if the dye leaked through the egg shell, you knew what you were eating. We spread old newspaper all over the floor to make our battle stations and got to work.
We boiled onion skins to make light orange, grated beets for red, purple cabbage for blue, spinach for green, and fresh turmeric for yellow. Then we strained the scraps through cheesecloth, poured the dye into little bowls, and painted dozens of eggs with tiny Dollarama paintbrushes.
I never thought the results were very impressive. It felt like so much work for the most hippie-looking eggs possible, waaaaay before drab plant-based colours were cool. I would eye the grocery store dye powder every year and wonder if this was the year we could have nice eggs too.
And now looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was. My mom took the time to build a tradition that let us be creative together, respectful of the environment and what we ate, and that tied us back to Bulgarian traditions. Even if I didn’t get the value of that at the time.
Now I’m older and wiser and know our eggs are the sickest of all.
Closing thoughts
Warmly yours,
Nina
If you’re wondering who’s behind this newsletter:
My name is Nina Iordanova. I’m a writer, community builder, and co-founder of Good People. My mission is to create more ways to make us feel like we belong - to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us.
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I found this article when I desperately needed it. Thanks for putting it here, Nina. Lots of love and support to you❤