5 kind things

The wonderful and very kind Stefanie tagged me for this meme and since it’s Friday and I don’t have anything else planned except some very disorganized mid-read thoughts on Nadine Gordimer’s Occasion for Loving, I thought I would do it right away! And I couldn’t resist putting in a few photos this time – liven things up before the weekend.

Here are the rules:

• List five kind things you do for yourself.
• List five kind things you do for your closest friend, partner or child.
• List five kind things you have done for a stranger.
• Have fun!
• Tag five people.  

And away we go… 

Five kind things I do for myself: 

1. Read/Write – I am combining these two activities because I have a hard time separating them anyway. In my life, they seem to go hand in hand. I can’t imagine a life without reading, without immersion in language and prose. As for writing, when we moved to Switzerland my husband and I decided I should spend as much of my time as financially possible writing, so I started translating in order to work from home and have flexible hours. This “experiment” is really working. I’m writing more than ever, I’ve placed my first novel with an agent in the States and I have plenty of time to pore over fiction as well as continue to work on my own.  

2. Walk- I walk an average of two hours a day. My dog and I ramble all over the hills and woods that surround the farmhouse we moved into last year. And on the weekends, my husband and I spend at least a few hours hiking. This quiet time has helped me become a much calmer person than I ever was before. When we still lived in the States, I was in grad school full time, working a high-stress job 30 hours a week and had a two hour commute every day. It was awful and my health suffered. Now, I take the time to think, to relax, to enjoy being outside. To look for mushrooms or flowers, listen to birds, watch for squirrels, foxes and deer. Just this week, I walked by one of the neighboring farms and saw the sheep now had lambs with them. Tiny tiny lambs that could barely walk. They were just beautiful. And this morning I saw a Green woodpecker – a stunning emerald bird with a crimson head and the most graceful swooping flight. Taking the time to see these things is definitely something I do for myself. 

3. Have a dog – Sounds silly I know. We rescued our dog from the Swiss humane society a year and a half ago. Since I work from home, I spend a lot of hours without any real human contact. Having the dog has changed that completely. She’s a real presence and a companion. I’m glad we’re giving her a good home, but if I want to be honest, I have to admit she’s making our home even better than it was before she came to live with us.  

4. Eat well and drink good wine – I love good food. And I love eating food from different cultures. I do a lot of experimenting with ingredients and look for unique recipes. I’m also willing to spend a little extra to have local produce. We’re really lucky where we live because we have one farm that provides all of our vegetables and another which is actually a countryside butcher. I can see exactly how the animals live – in fact, I pass them on my walks (not the lambs I mentioned earlier! Those particular ones are raised for wool – just in case anyone was worried) and it’s comforting to know exactly where our food is coming from.  

5. Acquire books – Definitely my biggest indulgence. And I rarely tell myself no. Sometimes I think it would be easier to have a shoe obsession or something I could at least talk myself out of for being un-essential. But not with books. I haven’t managed to convince myself they actually fall in the “want” category, as opposed to a “need”. I think books rank right up there with food and shelter. I do try to get as many as I can second hand or from bookmooch, but I still buy/order a significant number of books per year.  

Five kind things I do for my partner: 

1. Keep this blog – Fortunately, my husband is a big reader and we have wonderful discussions about the books we both read. But, he would go slightly nuts if I tortured him with every single detail of my reading life. He thanks you all from the bottom of his heart. 

2. Let him drum – He’s a physicist by day and a loud drummer by night. I have learned to live with the various explosions of double bass and crash symbols for an hour every evening. Secretly, I don’t mind. I just tuck myself upstairs with a book or take out a chapter I need to revise, close a few doors and I’m in my own world.  

3. Finish my plate – despite my love of food, I seem to have developed a bad habit somewhere along in my formative years. I very often leave two or three bites untouched on my plate or don’t finish my water glass. This drives my husband insane. It’s a wasteful American vs. a square Swiss thing. We joke about it, but I do really make an effort to finish what I’ve been served. J 

4. Email him – The Swiss workweek is long and he’s out of the house nearly eleven hours each day. Luckily, he’s not too busy being a smarty-pants physicist to send me silly emails. I do the same so we tend to hold a long conversation in short blurbs all day long. 

5. Pick him up at the train station in bad weather. He rides his bike to and from the train station every day, but sometimes when its really stormy I surprise him with the car. Or, if the dog and I are out for a late afternoon walk, we’ll arrange it so we pass the train station and then all three of us can walk home together pushing his bike up the hill.  

Five kind things I’ve done for a stranger: 

1. Put my dog back on the leash when a stranger approaches. Not everyone loves dogs as much as I do.

2. Donated food items to my local food bank

3. Help women with strollers get in and out of trains and buses

4. Block obnoxious teenagers from jumping first into the train when there are elderly people waiting to get in

5. Block obnoxious elderly people from standing too close to the train doors on the platform so that the people inside the train can actually get off – thus allowing everyone waiting to be able to get in

So now I need to tag five people – I think I will go with: Logophile, Imani, Ella, Dewey and Ted. And of course, anyone else who thinks this might be fun!