When I’m experiencing a bunch of negative emotions around something I have to do, I stop fighting it.

I just let myself take a break and give myself permission to not do the thing, if it’s really going to be that big a deal.

Neither my identity nor my worthiness is on the line. Okay, maybe I’ll let someone down. Maybe I’ll let myself down. But so be it.

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I have an ongoing text conversation with my cousin in which we seek to solve the problems of the universe…or at the very least, our own.

Recently, we observed how out of balance we can get if we follow advice meant for someone with a dramatically different temperament. “I don’t think everything is healed by action,” I said. “Rest is important. But probably if you’re a person who is constantly resting, you need more action.”

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My Brother, My Brother, & Me, a long-running podcast from brothers Justin, Travis, & Griffin McElroy, bills itself as “an advice show for the modern era” (Justin always pronounces it “modren”).

But this is not an advice show. It is a cleverly executed improv comedy show. The brothers field listener-submitted requests for advice along with selected Yahoo! Answers questions, offering deeply outlandish solutions to the problems presented. For instance, a question from a server in a restaurant about how to accommodate a guest who orders something that isn’t on the menu leads to speculation that perhaps the guest is a ghost who must return every week to the same restaurant until he is given his requested meal and is then gratefully “banished to the hell dimension” in a puff of vapor.

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In my early twenties, when I was trying to figure out my life, I briefly pursued the idea of moving to Boston, which is just over an hour from the small town on the southernmost coast of Maine where I grew up.

On a hot summer day (yes, they have them in New England), I drove down to an outlying commuter station and took the T into Cambridge, where I met with a really cool and interesting young woman and her roommate. They were looking for a third. I remember that the monthly rent for one room of this shared three-bedroom apartment was more than I ended up paying for my first one-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, which was a palace compared to these potential digs.

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When you push a kid on the swings, be ready for feedback.

“Faster! Higher! Higher!” It’s never enough, but they love it anyway.

To push someone in the metaphorical sense is the opposite of what it is to push someone on the swings. To push someone metaphorically is to effectively coerce them into doing something they would not normally have done, whereas the pushing that happens with respect to the swing set is invited and encouraged. It’s collaboration.

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