The delight of daily progress
Finding a haven in a sea of Adulting and making it all feel more doable.
Howdy! Welcome back to Traipsing About, a newsletter about reclaiming creativity and ditching tired personal paradigms. And indeed, there are plenty drawings in this one—having fun with varied ideas lately.
This week’s flashback: If the Roman Empire hadn’t collapsed, we’d still being using Roman numerals and Latin. Learning long division would suck, but we’d have fun, pithy sayings to bandy about. Luckily, I wrote this newsletter in English and zero math was required. Palma non sine pulvere! Semper progrediens!
This week on Adulting About, Edition #CXXVIII (uh oh, zee Romans):
Finding a daily haven to make adulting easier
FAQs about my Italian citizenship
Traipsing Tidbits: Adulting house maintenance tips, a drawing hack, and an influencer factory.
Two T. Rex drawings, rwar.
ICYMI: last newsletter I talked about finally getting recognized as an Italian citizen after three years of banging my head against bureaucracy.
Finding your personal daily haven
The other day, a friend and I were talking about adulting. Some days, it feels as if nothing is in our control, just whiffing hard at life curveballs.
Trusting that things will work out is a merry dance with chance. Where the heck is a dance floor where we can learn some steps without adulting stress?
That magic zone is in personal study. For me right now, that’s piano, languages and drawing. I can learn without being distracted by adult concerns like interest rates or health insurance deadlines. Most importantly, it’s an independent process—the only person who has to show up is me.
By sitting down consistently day after day to practice, I am confident I will improve, even if I can’t always see the daily progress. No doubt in my mind.
Getting to the edge of my skill, that deliberate practice zone where progress is made, may sound frustrating. “Don’t you get sick of failing, over and over?” Ah, but I’m not failing—I’m slowly building my skills, one brick at a time via drawing exercises or conversations in a foreign language.
It might not shine like a finished product (because it's not) but I'm succeeding, frequently! As Adam Grant writes in Hidden Potential, “the strongest known force in daily motivation is a sense of progress.” No wonder I’m so fired up.
I’m positive it’s part of why I’m enjoying these pursuits so much. It’s not the thrill of reaching an arbitrary performance goal like playing Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata or reaching C2 fluency in Italian. It’s the process that I’m loving, repeated little successes and brain stimulation independent of the complexities of adulting. That self-reliance in a controlled environment creates a haven that grounds my day and buffers me against the thunderstorms of daily life.
Sightseeing during the journey at my own pace, not just awaiting the destination. Every day, my brain and hands can do something that literally was not possible for me the day before. Once we’re past being wide-eyed children, where else in our lives can we do THAT?
Not with a sales forecasting spreadsheet, I’d wager.
Also important is that I’m not doing them for a “side hustle” to make money or to impress others. I’m for some reason captivated by piano, thrilled by thinking and communicating in a foreign language, and delighted by drawing. I feel so lucky to have found such activities in the midst of all the serious things that being an adult requires.
If I learn 10 vocab words per day in Spanish, I will know more words. If I practice my G harmonic minor piano scale, I’ll get faster and smoother. Sketching portraits of composers helps me draw better (even if Chelsea reminds me that it’s eccentric). The jury is still out on whether drawing a T. Rex improves anything except my mood.
Ah, the satisfaction of a controlled environment that borders on play! It’s the world of a kid entranced by a video game—leveling up skills, improving even if they get a few Game Overs and have to restart. The whole satisfaction is in the process, not the result.
This controlled sandbox with constant improvement works for my brain, but others might enjoy pastimes with less emphasis on progress and more about enjoying the moment. Think meditation or yoga—harder to observe progress, but still a refuge from adulting, a place to retreat and ground oneself. What’s important is having a different axis for your world to revolve around for a few minutes a day.
Regardless, I’ve noticed that my trust in The Process absolutely grounds me on a bedrock foundation. Success of some kind, every day.
No matter what headaches arise—insurance billing denials, websites crashing, pipes inexplicably leaking—having an environment where I can sit down and make progress day after day makes the other challenges in life more approachable.
For all you busy people trying to corral Adult Life: is there a daily space you can carve out where you’re 100% the boss?
Maybe it’s ten minutes of studying a language. Sketching a random object in your house. Lifting weights, doing yoga or reading for five minutes. Practicing chord strumming patterns with that guitar that’s hung on the wall for years.
Something—anything—where you get in the flow of the activity without worrying about life insurance plans or daycare availability for 10 minutes. Finding that different axis to spin about.
Stand on the foundation of those activities. Enjoy the progress.
Then get back to figuring out the necessary adulting. I bet you’ll find it easier.
FAQs about my Italian citizenship
I’ve written about my Italian citizenship quest over the past three years. (Still can’t believe it’s done!) During that time, I’ve received a lot of questions, both from people looking to get their citizenship and those merely curious.
Having answered those many times, I decided to brain dump all the questions (plus some I’ve seen online during my research) into an FAQs post. Here’s a sampling:
What’s the fastest way to find out if you’re eligible?
Find out if or when your Italian ancestor naturalized by locating a naturalization cert, which shows when your ancestor became (or didn’t become) a US citizen. Track it down via Ancestry.com, National Archives (NARA), or USCIS and confirm the citizenship date vs. the next of kin from that ancestor.
What’s it cost? Short answer: it depends. For DIYing mine, it was $1,500 To hire a company for white-glove service, upwards of $10,000.
Am I a full citizen? Do I get to keep my US citizenship? Can I vote? Can I live or work anywhere in the EU? Can Chelsea get Italian citizenship through me? Yes across the board!
For those really into this or wanting to learn how to see if they’re eligible, here is the entire FAQs post!
Traipsing About Tidbits
We’ve been on a solid adulting run of house maintenance lately, which helped inspire my essay above! Still, I’ve learned some useful things:
Clean the washing machine seal to avoid that moldy smell on your clothes.
Use a fabric lint shaver or actual safety razor to remove snags or cat claw marks on a sofa.
Clean off your fridge coils to make the fridge run better (our coils looked like fuzzy caterpillars lived on them, oooops).
Magic erasers really are magic—how do they get every mark off walls and trim?!
This 1-min video with a hack for perspective drawing was cool until the last 10 seconds, when it was REALLY cool.
This influencer factory in Indonesia is straight up wild (50 second Youtube video)
Quote of the Week
From The Way to Love by Anthony DeMello:
"You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not.
How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love."
You’ve reached the end of Traipsing About newsletter #CXXVIII (ok, fine, the Roman Empire is long gone...#128).
This week’s unsolicited advice: cultivate an activity you love (even it’s eccentric…or especially!) and gift yourself 10 minutes of time enjoying it. Don’t make it productive, make it YOURS.
Dum spiro spero! (While I breathe, I hope/aspire.)
Dakota
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