cheerfulmonk.com

The Other Coast

(For higher resolution click on the picture.)

I agree with the guru that kindness and following the golden rule is an important part of a happy life, as is love and friendship, but my happiness also needs something else.

Nathaniel Branden said,

The secret of happiness is to ask yourself every day: What’s good about my life? What needs to be done?

I amended it to

The secret of happiness is to ask yourself every day:
  (1) What’s good about my life?
  (2) What needs to be done?
  (3) How can I get this done and enjoy the process?

The third item is similar to

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
—Alan Watts

And I would add Bertand Russell’s,

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

What do you think? What works for you?

January 12, 2026

My Birthday Balloon is starting to lose it’s umph (after three weeks):

The Bean Plants are still trying, but they seem to be losing the battle.

Snow. Yes, we did get some more yesterday morning, but then the sun came out and it started to warm up again.

We did not get our propane. They had rescheduled for Thursday morning, but it was snowing, so Andy phoned to cancel. The woman he reached said they had already canceled it, but later he got a phone call from the driver saying he was on his way. He hung up before Andy could talk to him, so Andy drove up to the Forest Service gate with the key, waited for a half hour, then came home. Not being able to talk to the driver is a nuisance, to say the least.

We don’t need a refill yet, so we’ll cancel the delivery for now. They were offering a sale which would have saved us a few hundred dollars, but the sale ended Friday. It would have been nice if the fellow who delivered the past couple of times — and knew how to get to the house — had been able to come up when it was first scheduled. But that was not meant to be.

Getting our photovoltaic system working again. Andy mentioned this in the Christmas letter and we still can’t use the sun for power. I’ll spare you the details, but the piece we need to replace has been discontinued and, even more important, the fellow who has been doing the work hasn’t been answering our emails. He still has a serious case of long Covid so we don’t know what is going on.

That’s more than enough for one post! How are things going with you?

January 11, 2026

That was the one idea in the cartoons that wasn’t mine. When I used the cartoon before (Daily Fortune) I said it was from a daily fortune I had once received, and I should have mentioned that in yesterday’s post.

For curiosity I asked Perplexity and ChatGPT where the lines came from, and only Perplexity recognized it as being a fortune.

The sentence appears to be a modern fortune-cookie style saying, not a traceable quote from a specific author, book, or speech, and it is very likely a variant of a stock fortune-cookie message.

The interesting thing is it referenced two of my posts — Embracing Obstacles and Daily Fortune as places where that exact wording is used:

The exact wording “You have a great capacity for learning from your mistakes. You will learn a great deal today.” shows up on a personal blog, where the writer explicitly describes it as a favorite fortune from a fortune cookie, not as a quotation from a named author.

Large online collections of fortune-cookie sayings list a closely related version: “You learn from your mistakes… You will learn a lot today.” again with no author attribution, just as an anonymous cookie fortune.

ChatGPT looked for the quote in major quotation databases and didn’t have any luck.

I thought that was interesting. And I’m impressed by the version I use.

You have a great capacity for learning from your mistakes. You will learn a great deal today.

has more punch than the more common,

You learn from your mistakes… You will learn a lot today.

Anyway, a fun adventure.

January 10, 2026

Some some commenters have said I have artistic talent. No, not at all! Ask me to draw something and you’re lucky if I can do a stick figure. I didn’t even draw those by hand. I searched and searched for bits of them that I could modify, and I assembled them in Photoshop. Then I revised and revised and revised by cutting and pasting and redrawing with my mouse. It took me days to do each one. But I wasn’t blogging every day — or trying to get to bed at a decent time — and they made me happy.

Here are three more that I still like:

January 9, 2025

Yesterday’s post reminds me of two other cartoons I drew years ago:

The second one reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time:

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.
—Duke Ellington

It never ceases to touch my heart.

January 8, 2026

In the upper right-hand corner of my iPad I have a photo widget. I don’t know how it came to be, but it shows a little picture (which changes from time to time) from my Memories and Featured Photos. I mostly ignore it, but once in a while a photo grabs my attention and I click on it to see it full screen. Here are four of them.

Kaitlin and Torben sent me this first one — of Tempi in some poppies when they were living in California:

I took this one up on the land a couple of years ago:

This one was taken in January, 1987. Back then the winters were snowy, and we had to snowshoe for a couple of miles to get to the land.

That was a long time ago!

This last one is a cartoon I drew years ago. I was surprised to see it, but it still makes me laugh.

It’s a good reminder to be able to laugh at ourselves.

January 7, 2026

1. Instagram Reel
    This was too good not to share. Click on the photo to see what happened.

2. Bean Update

    The bean plants are starting to look bedraggled.

But they are still trying.

3. Propane Update
    They were supposed to come up by yesterday, but that didn’t happen. So they put us back in the queue and we may be scheduled again in 3-5 days.

January 6, 2026

My New Year’s post talked about noticing which of my automatic habits were making my life happier, healthier, and more meaningful, and which weren’t — then gradually making appropriate changes. Here are three habits that I have changed:

• Parking in front of new steps — I wrote that the first time I drove home after we got our new stairs, I almost parked by the old ones. I remembered in time, and I never had to remind myself again.

   
  

  

• Keeping the apartment neat — I was surprised how easy it was to make that switch. As I’ve said before, my apartment used to be my play pen. If I got immersed in a project, I didn’t mind if things got untidy. I knew when the mood struck I would put things back in order until the next immersion. Andy didn’t mind so it was a fine way of operating.
   
  Then in fall 2024 Kaitlin convinced me to have Merry Maids come in every two weeks to clean. I was tickled to see how easy it was switch to my new system. Now I like things looking uncluttered and keep it that way. Who would have guessed?

 

• Automatically becoming centered — It took a while to establish this one. But now when I’m hit with a challenge and start to tense up, I automatically get centered — an alert mind in a relaxed body. Remembering this image helps.
  

  acorn.com

  That, without a doubt, is one of the wisest things I have ever done in my life.

January 5, 2025

Stress-Hardiness

The quote in yesterday’s post,

The quality of our lives depends on how we focus our energy and our attention.

comes from

The Traits of Stress-Hardy, Resilient People

I wrote that about 25 years ago when I was teaching a course on transforming stress into personal power. There’s a link to it on the right sidebar under Stress-Hardiness (as well as ChatGPT’s rewrite called Stress-Hardiness, ChatGPT Version).

I decided to read it again to see if it still feels true. It does. There are always things for me to work on, but it’s a great guide for me.

Bean Update

Do you remember those bean flowers from last Tuesday?

It looks as if they have turned into the start of bean pods:

Here’s a closeup of a Wikimedia picture of pods on a bean plant.

I’m gobsmacked. No other word for it.

January 4, 2026

The quality of our lives depends on how we focus our energy and our attention.

That’s one of my mantras — it goes along with these two:

• Play your part well and let go of the results.
• Stay curious and open to life. No matter what happens, keep learning and growing. Find what you love and find a way to share it with others.

They’re all a part of pulling the weeds and nurturing the flowers.

Yesterday the first one took a more specific form,

Don’t waste your time fussing about things you have no control over.

Andy was starting to complain about our propane company. They were scheduled to bring some propane to the land Thursday, and we were happy about that. The roads are free of snow, and the Forest Service wasn’t scheduled to lock their gates until yesterday. We were relieved we didn’t have to deal with that.

Unfortunately, I received an email in the afternoon:

We are sorry we were unable to deliver your propane on a recent visit because the gate was locked

We are working to reschedule your order. In the meantime, please ensure we are able to safely access the tank. Someone will contact you shortly regarding your delivery.

No, no gate was locked. The fellow just got lost. (We’re not blaming him, GPS maps are notorious for being inaccurate up there.) And phoning Customer Service directs us to a centralized call center, which doesn’t know anything about our area.

We did phone them yesterday morning and asked that the driver contact us when he is going to deliver so Andy can tell him where to meet. They will let us know a day ahead of time, sometime before Monday, and the driver is supposed to phone us when he is on his way. The hope is for Andy to stay down here and talk to driver about where exactly to meet, and assume Andy can get up to the Forest Service gate with the key before the driver gets there. Not ideal, but fingers crossed!

I am asking Perplexity and ChatGPT if they have any suggestions for the future. I will let you know how it all turns out!

January 3, 2026