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Miscellaneous

smoke glasses.

by erin | 12.10.2007


“so hot they’re smokin‘.”

$275 from Design Within Reach.

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HEY THERE, I’M ERIN

By day, I change diapers and write essays and design products and answer emails. I speak at international events, say another prayer, brew another coffee. By day I travel the world, or at least the grocery. I read another chapter and kiss another skinned knee and battle another bad habit. I fry bacon. I change my outfit. I refill my husband’s water glass and then style lookbooks and sing lullabies and search for that ubiquitous missing sock yet again.

By night, I write it all down here.

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  • PEOPLE
    • Family + Kids
    • Marriage + Friendships
    • Self Reflection + Growth
    • Other
  • PLACES
    • Travel + Adventure
    • Home + Rest
    • Work + Projects
    • Other
  • THINGS
    • Style + Beauty
    • Food + Drink
    • Ideals + Musings
    • Other
ERIN’S PICK OF THE WEEK

A Better Day

Feel like every calendar on the market doesn’t quite make room for the many roles you fill on any given day? Me, too. (Until now.) Enter this $6 beauty –... Read more →

  • #thegoodlist | porch sweeps, skeeball wins. a coney for dessert.
  • A few years ago, I was asked to man the blogging mentor table for @altsummit. I say yes, hop the flight. Show up with steaming coffee, a braid in my hair, notebook in hand. I sit down to what I think will be a variety of questions on editorial strategy, social media, monetization. But as it turns out, everyone wants the same thing: Permission to follow their gut. Over and over, women sit in front of my table with weary eyes and say, “I want to be here, at X, but this speaker just told me I should be there, at Y. What do you think?” My answer was this, every time: Run from the Y. Run in the opposite direction of the should. Because the should is a road that is not your own. You found your own when you said 'I want to be here, at X,' and isn’t that half the battle? It's just that we spend so much time longing to find our X, and if we’re lucky, it is revealed to us through a series of terrible jobs and sleepless nights and endless failures. And we find it, finally. It is sweet and lovely and lush and green, but then we clear it away looking for Y – for a shiny, emerald city of a path that was never intended for us. And so, today, to you, my advice is very much the same: If your X is a mother who finds joy in baking veggie muffins and finger painting with your toddler, run far from the Y that says you must accomplish more. If your X is a nurse working the night shift who finds peace in comforting the sick and the hurt and the confused, run far from the Y that says you must be at home, vacuuming. If your X is a blogger who finds fulfillment in writing and connecting and learning, run far from the Y that says you must have a book deal and a TV show and a larger Instagram following. You have found your X. You are here. Let yourself be here, and rest in the crux of this spot, this day. And then: walk your road, sister. On and on and on and on.
  • #thegoodlist | mixing bowl astronauts, lime popsicles. a loose tooth, or the hope of such.
  • Whenever I teach journaling classes, or writing classes of any sort, I am forever asked how I find the time. How do you carve out a few minutes to write every single day? But I don’t think that’s the real question we wrestle with, is it? The real question is a far simpler one: Is it essential? We find time for the essential, after all. We find time to brush our teeth, to shower, to feed the dogs, to feed ourselves. We find time to go to work, to go to sleep, to go to the grocery for milk. And so, the question isn’t how we find the time. ​ ​ It is why. ​The answer, for me, is that writing is the most indulgent practice, and also the least, given that each contradiction met on the page offers the opportunity to accept the many contradictions of another. That's it. T​here is no how. Sit down at your local coffee shop and type out a blog post. Make notes on the back of your kid’s artwork, grocery lists, appointment reminders, marketing meeting agendas. Draw pictures on a napkin at the sports bar. Write long-winded cursive letters to your future self in a leather-bound journal on a rainy day. Leave yourself voice recordings while sautéing the onions. Listen, I know you’re busy. I know you have small children, or aging parents, or needy dogs and grown-up responsibilities and a full-time job and you're already late for the dentist. Write that down, too, if you’d like. Say what it feels like to be drowning. Feel the shape of those words. Understand that this is your life – your gift. Allow yourself five minutes to introduce yourself to it. It will look ugly. The truth often does. You’ll be tempted to twist your words into lies that make you sound like less of a jerk at the end of the day. Understand that we’re all jerks at the end of the day. Choose to be one of the honest ones. Yes, journaling is essential. It is essential to me, and I think likely to you, and the how doesn't matter. But the why does. Here’s to the stories we live, and the stories we tell. May they be one and the same.
  • #thegoodlist | toddler lisps, truck burgers in a thunderstorm. when your favorite uncle comes to town.
  • Tag your fave grad for a non-commencement address: 👉🏻 First, the bad news. You have been taught a lie. You have been taught that today is the first day of the rest of your life, that life is suddenly beginning for you. But it’s not. Life has already begun for you. You, our great youth, have walked the ground longer than the lifespan of a dragonfly. You have outlived the cherry tree. You stand taller than the wildflowers in Mount Rainier. Your heartbeat has already been set in motion, joining 7 billion of us, time ticking recklessly. This is not your commencement; this is your continuing. This is you, continuing to learn (and teach) what it means to love greatly. And so, the good news. You already know what you need to know to succeed in life, because you are already succeeding. You are facing a broken world, one where coffee is astronomically expensive and gunshots are echoing and your abs aren’t quite what you’d like them to be. You have made choices, shed tears, laughed loudly. You have hiccuped. Blinked 190 million times. Your arm has fallen asleep beneath someone you have loved. Might we call that a miracle? And so, my hope for you today, and every day in your continuation, is that you will witness this miracle, each bruise and breath. That you will gaze at your generation as we do: cherished, esteemed. Other hopes: that your parking meter be ever full. That the futon is on sale, that you call your grandmother. I hope you remember your pin number and forget your phone. Floss. Bathe in a creek, sleep on a floor. Break dance in Chipotle. Carry your friends. I hope you’re kind to the waitress. I hope you get leg room on the way to Florence. But mostly: I hope you dare to be ordinary. I hope you allow yourself a handful of terrible jobs and long commutes and bad dates. That you get tongue-tied on conference calls, botch the interview. I hope you find the miracle even then, in the most uncomfortable, unfortunate of instances. (I hope you forgive yourself when you can’t.) Welcome to the miracle, dear graduates. Beautiful things happen. Good things end. Here we are anyway. Congratulations to you on this remarkable blip. May your continuing dazzle us all.
  • #thegoodlist | a swallowtail on your arm. rain in your coffee cup, sheet cake in a tent.
  • I was raised a competitive swimmer. From dawn until dusk, I’d find myself either submerged in a pool perfecting my stroke, or thinking of such. I wore Speedo shirts. I rinsed the green out of my mane with Ultra Swim. I grew my leg hair to create drag, shaving it only before sectionals. I was ever passionate about swimming. I loved it. But it did not love me in return, or more specifically, it did not love my body. A series of recurring ear infection​s ​rendered my left ear legally deaf by the time I hit 30. My passion arrived with a choice: Do I quit swimming, or quit hearing? What I’m saying is this: the sweet spot is not void of conflict. Our passions do not materialize without tension, our dreams are not delivered in tidiness. The beauty, then, is not in finding our passion. It’s in choosing to live it anyway. That is the sweet spot, the glorious mess of it all. The children we love who drive us momentarily​ insane. The job we’re crazy about, except for that commute. The relationship that arrives with emotional baggage. The nation we yearn for, all faults and furies. Passion is not absent of pressure. Significance is not absent of stress. Love is not absent of loss. Hum anyway. Smile at your inbox. High-five that security guard. Go ahead; walk on air. You don’t need to live your life’s passion to live a passionate life. The sweet spot isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But life? Life is.
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ABOUT

Author of Chasing Slow and founder of Design for Mankind, Erin Loechner has been blogging and speaking for more than a decade, garnering over one million fans worldwide. Her heartfelt writing and design work has been recognized in renowned international events for clients such as Walt Disney World, IKEA, Martha Stewart and Home Depot. Now nestled in a Midwestern town, Erin, her husband, and two kids strive for less in most areas except three: joy, grace, and goat cheese.

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