A postal truck more beautiful than you’ve ever seen

I’ll never forget this

(3 min read)

“That postal truck is literally the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

And he wasn’t lying.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

In this case, the beholder was my dad.

My dad lost one of his eyes many years ago (from a retina detachment that couldn’t be fixed) and then had just recently temporarily lost vision in his other eye from another retina detachment, and he had been living as a (now completely) blind person for a week.

I had gone to live with my parents that week to help out before the surgery.

He was understandably very anxious for the surgery to go well.

When the surgery did go well, and we were driving him home, the first thing he saw when taking off his bandages was the postal truck driving in front of us.

He’ll never forget that sight and the flood of positive emotions he felt.

(Not the actual truck from that day, but you get the idea)

Seeing my dad experience loss and then the renewed appreciation of having vision in one eye once he regained it helped me to appreciate my own vision and much more in my life too.

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I was unloading the dishwasher just now and noticing my habit:

Every morning, I’m the first one to wake up, and I unload the dishwasher and put most of the stuff away in cabinets.

But some of the stuff I leave out on drying racks and pads. For 2 reasons:

1. Our plastic containers always seem like they’d benefit from more drying before they get stacked together in the cabinet.

2. The cabinet where they belong is very full and therefore less organized than I’d prefer.

My partner Katie then handles putting those containers away when she wakes up.

Point #2 above relates to one of my favorite principles.

Affordance.

In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning, referring to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.

We tend to do what’s easy to do.

What feels intuitive.

What doesn’t require patience or delicate precision.

What we could do even when blind.

I think about it every day.

Witnessing my dad’s life as a blind person helps me think about it every day.

Throughout my house, everything that is tidy is only tidy because of affordance.

If an item has a “home”, and if that home is somewhere so obvious and easy to access that I could put the item away when blinded, then the item is nearly always where it belongs.

To put away those plastic containers is a chore. It requires thinking.

I’m not looking to solve a puzzle first thing in the morning.

(So, it’s on my list to think creatively about how to decide new, more spacious homes for the plastic containers.)

How can we use affordance to change our habits and improve our lives?

What habits would you like?

Possible examples:

• Read more

• Maintain a fitness routine

• Journal

• Go on more dates with your partner

• Eat healthier

Okay, so… What little mini-habits would be easy to adopt to then make the important goal habits more automatic?

• Read more

  • Block off time on your calendar for daily reading

  • Create a sorted list of books you want to read

  • Put your Kindle next to where you like to read most

• Maintain a fitness routine

  • Block off time on your calendar for daily fitness

  • Buy enough workout clothes

  • Lay out all gear you need in a convenient place the night before so that it’s super easy to get started

• Journal

  • Block off time on your calendar for daily journaling

  • Buy a journal and a pen that you actually enjoy

  • Make them live in a place that is conducive to journaling

• Go on more dates with your partner

  • Block off time on your calendar for frequent date nights

  • Block off time on your calendar (maybe monthly) for brainstorming and planning out a list of dates

• Eat healthier

  • Create rules for what is allowed in your house.

  • E.g. in recent months, we’ve stopped buying food “products”. We only buy from the produce section (or canned beans and other whole foods). Occasionally we’ll buy sorbet as a treat. But generally we don’t buy anything processed.

  • It’s amazing how snacking on junk just happens because junk is around. If the junk isn’t around, what is available tastes good too.

Are there any easier little tasks you can complete to make the big ones more effortless and automatic?

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