Somewhere to start
What nourishes you
The sunlight, from outside the tree.
What reaches you from outside and gives something back: people, places, beauty, music, food, nature, affection, presence. Not what you achieved, and never something to increase.
Sunlight is what reaches a life from outside and gives something back. People, places, music, food, weather, beauty, affection, being somewhere that suits you.
It is deliberately not achievement. A life can be full of accomplishment and short of this, and it can be modest by every external measure and full of it.
Nobody keeps a record of these things, which is exactly why they go quiet without anyone deciding to let them. Naming them is usually enough to notice what has been missing.
What this can help you notice
- What still reliably gives something back, however small.
- What used to and has gone quiet without a decision being made.
- How much of it depends on other people and how much you can reach alone.
- The difference between what restores you and what merely distracts you.
- That there is nothing to increase here and no score to raise.
The book keeps sunlight separate from achievement, and refuses to let it become another thing to optimise.
Where people usually start
Workshop, around thirty minutes
The parts that are working
Build an honest account of what is good, in enough detail to protect it.
Why it is relevant here: Deliberately spends its attention on the parts of a life that are already working.
Workshop, around twenty minutes
What deserves your attention
Look at anything that is not working and see whether it calls for change, protection, acceptance or simply more time.
Why it is relevant here: Works out what genuinely deserves your attention, which is not always the loudest thing.
Session, about 30 minutes
What do I want this next part of my life to be about?
A guided AI conversation designed to explore what might deserve a bigger part in the next chapter of your life.
Why it is relevant here: Useful when what nourishes you and what you spend your time on have drifted apart.
If you want to go further
Four things made by other people, chosen because they are useful rather than because they agree with us. None of them is homework, and none of them is a view TAIU is asking you to hold.
READ · Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Flow
Why this may be useful: The original account of absorption, and of how rarely people notice which activities actually produce it.
harpercollins.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)WATCH · Robert Waldinger
What Makes a Good Life?
Why this may be useful: Short, and clear about what people reported as sustaining across eighty years of following them.
ted.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Stephen Kaplan
The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework
Why this may be useful: On the ordinary conditions under which attention refills, rather than the ones that require a holiday.
sciencedirect.com ↗ (Opens in a new tab)READ · Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton
Spending money on others promotes happiness
Why this may be useful: A study on giving and wellbeing, offered as a finding to weigh rather than an instruction to be generous.
science.org ↗ (Opens in a new tab)
Reading it, and keeping it
Everything listed on this page can be read and worked through without an account. Nothing you write in a public session is sent anywhere or stored by us.
Signing in adds one thing: your own words stay, in My Tree, so that when you come back in six months you can see what you thought at the time rather than reconstructing it.
Take this in any order, or take one and stop there. Deciding that nothing needs changing is a real answer, and it is worth knowing why.