Environmental Enrichment

I love making life fun and beautiful. One of the happiest choices I made recently was to color block my Instagram feed so that each month/sun sign is a sequential color of the rainbow. Another was to start eating lunch at a local food truck stop - not just on the days when my favorite truck is there, but just going every day they're open and eating whatever is there. I've tried lots of new things and liked them all (currently topping the favorites list is curry noodles from the Thai truck).

Because the only problem with making life fun and beautiful is that it takes a lot of thought and effort, or at minimum noticing what's around. And by the time I've created a school schedule/curriculum plan for the Bigs that has them talking about how much they love school and added in fun extras like celebrating Butterfly Day or going to the state fair, there's not a lot of brainpower left for anything else.

Someone on Twitter mentioned the other day that she'd like to have someone who provided environmental enrichment, like zookeepers do to keep captive animals engaged. It immediately struck me that a human version of that is subscription services - letting someone else choose your book, or tea, or outfit for the month, and then conveniently sending it to your doorstep. Cutting through the extra steps and getting right to the fun part.

As part of my effort to not overthink things this month, I've been reading books chosen by their covers/recommended by others, as mentioned, and eating lunch at the food truck of the day. I also experimentally tried a HelloFresh subscription, so see if that would get us out of our dinner rut. I do not enjoy cooking, even for myself, but especially not for three small persons who have an unspoken agreement that they must not ever all like the same thing at the same time. But if someone else can go to the work of putting ingredients with recipes and getting them to me, then I can manage making it three nights a week. The first week's meals were delicious (see the tacos above), and being less emotionally invested meant that I was less hurt when one or more kids refused to so much as taste something.

When I had writing assignments as a kid, I always did better when I had a few parameters. What kind of poem? What does this essay need to be about? Just "write something" is the end of my ability to think creatively, but "write an essay about your least favorite book" could bring out pages. That's one reason why I organize these blog posts the way that I do - having that structure helps me be both more creative and more focused. Deliberately allowing others to reduce my options feels like an extension of that. I'm no longer spending my energy narrowing down the almost limitless options, and that allows me to fully enjoy the actual outcome.

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