Save the Date

consider hosting a quiet day

Two years ago I wrote a post about a day of quiet spent at my friend’s house. Her children and husband left the house for the day. We each brought potluck contributions for breakfast and lunch together. We talked, spent quiet time alone outside looking through our planning books and notebooks, and each other’s books. We talked again, packed up, and drove home.

It was a very simple and incredibly impactful gift that my friend offered by having us over that Saturday. Essentially it was a retreat, but a homemade version.

Is this something you could consider hosting for your community? Or perhaps planning with a friend, you do the planning, they host?

imaginary save the date I made for fun. Evite options have become so well designed!

If and when you do send out a note, set an early response time for RSVPs. People have become so accustomed to receiving multiple alerts about things, they may wait to reply, even if they are excited about the idea! See below for more on this habit.

a gentle nudge

Charlotte Mason had a number of fairly interesting ideas about educating children. Last year I worked through her Volume 6 A Philosophy of Education with some friends and there’s one idea of hers I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because it is truly wild:

Don’t repeat things.

This was one of those things that when I read it, I found radical from the first read. Don’t repeat yourself?? Isn’t that one of my primary purposes in life these days? The daily litanies—how long till a certain date, how soon is such and such, what can I eat, why can’t I….

Charlotte writes basically that you should try to say things one time to children humans. The more you repeat yourself, the more they count on you repeating to yourself. And, the more you repeat, the less a child (or adult) is cultivating attention.

A single reading is a condition insisted upon because a naturally desultory habit of mind leads us all to put off the effort of attention as long as a second or third chance of coping with our subject is to be hoped for.

-Charlotte Mason, A Philosophy of Education Volume 6

I’ve noticed something about myself with repetition. There are certain institutions that will send me three emails in advance of an event. Over time, without realizing it, my brain has become accustomed to receiving these three emails. I don’t respond until I get the third email, even though I read the first one thoroughly. This past winter, a friend sent out an invite to an event. I added the event to my calendar and didn’t reply. She subsequently cancelled the event because so few people got back to her; though of course, as it turned out, many people had been planning on it. Bad habits sheesh….

So this has been my gentle nudge of practice this week. Instead of robotically repeating my answers over and over, instead I say, “See if you can remember what I said last time you asked.” In particular I am asked to repeat myself when I’ve given a few directions, even though I just stated them very clearly to the child. I’d like to incentive listening and understanding directions the first time they are said.

If you’d like to read more about what she writes on this topic, and how that compares to her practice of narration, this post on Simply Charlotte Mason is a great explainer.

and a quote for you

Q: Where is it in our economy that AGI will affect last in a significant manner?

A: Ooh, I’d hazard a guess that it’s going to be things that are the trades and the most artisanal parts of them. You might think of trades as having things like electricians or plumbing, or also things like gardening. I think within those, you get certain high-status, high-skill parts, where people want to use a certain tradesman, not just because of their skill but because of their notoriety and sometimes an aesthetic quality.

I think that my take might be…gardening, actually.

-from the fascinating interview with Tyler Cowin & Jack Clark, Anthropic (Claude) AI co-founder

On the topic, the garden is planted : )

Also…a video of a profoundly slurpy rhubarb bellini. Basically you boil rhubarb down with a little water and sugar (three cups rhubarb to 1/4 c water and 1/4 c sugar) until it’s very soft and almost jammy. Add a squeeze of lemon juice once cooled. Drop a spoonful into a glass and pour sparkling water or wine on top. Delicious.