#442 - Thoughtful Gift-Giving When Budgets Are Tight

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Today's episode 442, thoughtful gift giving when budgets are tight. We are entering the season where we'd like to start thinking about holiday gifts. And I'd like to give you some ways to think about it, especially on a limited budget, which many of us are on right now. So that your thinking can evolve into action before you get desperate and spend more than you have on gifts that you wouldn't have even chosen. If you had a little more time. So I'm going to share my five rules of thoughtful gift giving. I will share six budget friendly categories of potential gift ideas that that act as lenses to help you come up with fun and thoughtful gifts for your people. And then I'm going to share seven themes that you can use as a family or a friend group that put everybody on the same gift giving playing field, which can be helpful when you're financially not on the same playing field. I did not intend for the numbers to be five, six, seven, but it's always fun when it works out that way. After that, we're going to have a little extra something where I share a fun new to me way to plan a trip to a new place. We're going to celebrate the lazy genius of the week with one of the sweetest, easiest ways to care for a friend. And we will close with a mini pep talk for when you're struggling with the monotony of life. Before we get into that, here is your friendly reminder that this week is when our next pair of newsletters will get sent out. So on Wednesday, folks are going to get the latest lazy letter, which is our monthly newsletter with stories and ideas from me that I don't share anywhere else. I'm a lot more open about my personal life in that newsletter, sharing things that I'm trying and learning and struggling through. Last month, I shared what my life looks like day to day and the responses to that were so fun. I also shared the recipe for a fire pork that I mentioned like a week or two ago on the show, but the newsletter folks, they got it first. They kind of get everything first. One woman tried it, tried the recipe and responded that her 16 year old asked for it weekly. So there's a lot of fun gold in that newsletter. If you'd like to get it this Wednesday, you can try it out and see what you think. You can head to thelazygeniuscollective.com slash join to sign up. The other newsletter that will go out on Wednesday is the book list. So this is where I share all the books that I read the past month, which is usually around 10 books. And it's a fun way for you to find new reads and also know what to skip, what is not going to be for you. So one book I read in October was Elizabeth Gilbert's new memoir All The Way to the River. And I definitely have some thoughts about that one. So I'll share that in the newsletter. I've also read several newer releases this month, which is kind of unusual for me. I don't usually read new releases. So if you would like my reviews of Wally Lambs, The River is Waiting, Patrick Ryan's Buckeye, or another half dozen books I read, you can go to thelazygeniuscollective.com slash book list to sign up for that newsletter. You can sign up for one or both, but just remember they only come out once a month. And for this month, it's this Wednesday. It's the first Wednesday of every month. So you can sign up so you don't miss it if you don't want to miss it. All right, let's get into thoughtful gift giving when budgets are tight. Now, whether you're on a tight budget or not, I do think this episode is going to be helpful. It is chock full of tools and ideas that you can use for your own gift giving this holiday season. But this is coming from someone, me, who genuinely loves giving gifts. Like it's one of my favorite things. So let's start with the five rules that I use for thoughtful gift giving. Okay. Rule number one is there's no such thing as a perfect gift. No such thing. I've been saying this for years, but this language of like saying the perfect gift, it is a marketing ploy that is meant to make you keep shopping and feel bad about whatever it is you got. Just let it go. You don't have to feel the pressure to make someone like so impressed or so elated. By whatever you gave them, there is no perfect gift out there for a person. And even if there is, if someone's like, this is perfect, like there's more than one, there's a ton of them. So stop the search, especially if that search is causing you stress. Let go of the myth of the perfect gift. Rule number two, give joyfully. Now, I mean this in two ways. The first way is likely what you first thought, you know, be a person who joyfully gives gifts. If you're feeling some kind of way about giving a gift to a certain person that maybe you don't like very much or you're resenting for some reason, or you're just feeling down about it, like pay attention to that feeling, examine how you might give to that person joyfully. And if you can't, maybe you don't need to give them a gift. Like maybe there's a shift that you need to make in your actual gift giving or in your emotions. Like maybe you don't know them as well anymore. That relationship has shifted, right? The giving is meant to be joyful. So pay attention when you're not feeling that way. Now the second take on that rule of give joyfully is to pay attention to the joy created by the gift. Now don't try to impress, but try and create joy. And joy can be found in the simplest things. I have mentioned this book before, but joyful by Ingrid Fattel Lee. It is a handbook on how to create joy in your regular life, mostly in your like aesthetics and your surroundings. But I love using her research to enhance gift giving. So she found 10 qualities that bring joy aesthetically, but I do think they apply to gifts. One in particular is abundance. Abundance creates joy, which is why I love giving someone like a whole load of their favorite snack. Or like a stack of books that I found at used book sales and bookstores that I think that person would like. Or like every kind of sour candy at the store for somebody who likes sour candy. Abundance, even for the tiniest things, it brings a lot of joy. Another element of joy that works well for gifts that is in her book is surprise. Now obviously gifts inherently are a surprise. But things like a box and a box and a box. That creates an environment of surprise that requires no extra money, but adds so much joy. Right. A lot of the gift ideas that I will share later in this episode, they do have kind of an element of surprise to them because there's a thoughtfulness to them. But ultimately, I just want you to think about creating joy in your gift. Don't seek to impress. Don't try to find the perfect gift. Just create joy. Give joyfully, both in your spirit and with the gift itself. Rule number three, give in your season. Obviously, Lacey Geniuses live in the season, but when it comes to giving, you also need to give in your season. Your budget might be really tight. A family member might be sick, which changes the gathering, right? This might be the first Christmas where your extended family is not gathering on the same day that they have for the last decade. All of that is okay. We go through seasons and our gifts should match that, which sometimes means no gifts in the traditional sense at all. It's good to remember that even in a season that is saturated with like tradition that you can change something based on the season you're in. Give in your season. Remember, now is not forever. So tend to the way that things are right now without assuming it's always going to be that way. There is so much freedom in that. All right, rule number four, treat holiday giving like a project. Because it is. If you struggle with doing things last minute, that's okay. You know, if you even like the last minute rush of finding gifts, that's also okay. Like, keep doing that if you like it. That if you're trying to be a bit more thoughtful with your gifts, whether it's because you would like to get things that the person would enjoy or because money is tight, consider channeling whatever planning energy you have into this project. Because it is a project. It's many steps. If you need a place to put all of that planning, you could check out the project's playbook that is available in our store. It just came out last week. It'll walk you through the steps of planning any project with space to like write things down that matter to you. So that could be a nice place or you could just use an notebook. It's totally fine. But ultimately, I want you to treat holiday giving like the project that it is. So you're not overwhelmed by it. And then finally, rule number five, don't apologize. I would like for you to put away gift disclaimers. I'd like for you to not enter a moment where you're giving someone a gift. And I don't want you to immediately lead with like, it's okay if you don't like it, we can take it back. You know, give joyfully. You don't have to perch on that person's shoulder waiting for them to open it, you know, but try and remove apologies out of your language. I know in your heart that those apologies are coming from a place of care for the person that you're giving this gift to. And there's something in you that thinks that the gift is like maybe not going to make them quite as happy as you like because of like the time you were able to give or your money or your creativity or whatever. But really those apologies, they make the giving more about you than about that person. So just keep your apologies out of the conversation. You know, when you give, you can just say like, this made me think of you. And let, that's it. Like let it breathe, right? Apologies strip the joy out of gift giving sometimes. So pay attention when you try and sneak it in, even when you're thinking about it as you get a gift at all. If you find yourself being like, well, I don't take that out of this. This is not, this is not thoughtful gift giving, right? Okay, so these are your five rules. So there's no perfect gift. Give joyfully, give in your season, treat holiday gifts like the project they are and don't apologize. Those five things offer a solid foundation to start from. All right, before we get into some gift ideas and themes you can borrow for your family or your friend group, let's take an ad break, which makes this episode free for you to listen to. So thank you sponsors for that. At a time where a lot of content is understandably going behind a paywall, we are really grateful that we get to keep making shows that are completely free for you. So if you would like a recap of our podcast episodes to come to your email inbox, so you don't have to, you know, take notes or whatever, you can sign up for the latest lazy listens, which will land in your inbox every other Friday. For episodes like this one with a lot of lists, it's really nice to have that recap in black and white. You can sign up at thelazygeniuscollective.com slash listens. This episode is sponsored by understood.org. We talk a lot around here about naming what matters and building systems that actually work for your real life. I know that for some of you, your real life includes raising neurodivergent kids, which can make a lot of typical parenting advice feel like it just doesn't quite fit. Or maybe it was never written with you in mind to begin with. If that sounds familiar, I want to tell you about a podcast called Everyone gets a juice box for parents of neurodivergent kids. It's a really thoughtful show full of honest conversations from parents who understand the nuance here. They talk about things like navigating diagnoses, handling meltdowns, and even mom rage, that overwhelm and burnout that doesn't mean you're a bad parent, it just means you're human. What I appreciate about it is how steady it feels. It doesn't rush you or try to fix everything. It just offers practical help and a quiet reminder that you're not alone in this. To listen, search for Everyone gets a juice box in your podcast app. That's Everyone gets a juice box. For real? No way. What a deal. Your new morning groove. Ice coffee from McDonald's, any size for just 99 cents till 11am. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. All right, so we've covered the five rules of thoughtful gift giving. And now I want to share six lenses or categories where you might find creative, budget-friendly gifts for the people in your life. Those categories are make, help, experience, encourage, curate, and remember. All right, now you do not have to do this for every single person on your gift list, but spending a little time with that list of folks and these categories, it could offer some surprisingly easy, joyful ideas that require very little money, but give a lot of joy. So our first category is make. You could make something for that person. Now, this is a pretty common idea, one that a lot of people who say they aren't creative get really discouraged by as well. But I want to pause that feeling for a second. There are things that you can be creative with when it comes to making a gift, but there are other things that are easy enough to make even if you don't see yourself as a creative person. You could make a playlist. You can make a playlist. Find out what platform your person listens to their music on and then make a playlist specifically for them on that platform. Playlists are the most fun when they are weirdly specific. So think of a specific time of the day or the week where this person would enjoy a specific kind of music. It might be a playlist called Rage Resetting the House After Christmas Chaos and it's just like 90s dance bops. A playlist I recently came across is Fall Grocery Shopping in 1999. It's hits from 1999 that make wandering the grocery store aisles more fun. That kind of thing is so much fun. You can personalize it to the person, right? And it requires no artistic ability. Like just make a playlist. You can give it to the person on like an actual CD, you know, like write a note on a CD or even a cassette tape if you're as old as I am. And you can like write the link on the old CD or tape or you can make a CD or tape out of like cardboard. You know, there's so many fun ideas to physically give someone a playlist that you made them. You can make a game. If your person is really into games, you can create one. You can make up a board game or a card game or a scavenger hunt. You can make your own version of Monopoly where like all the properties are nostalgic places where like you and your siblings went or something. I don't know. So make a game, box it up, call it good. You can make fabric crafts like a scarf. You can make jewelry or a painting or cross stitch or you can hand letter or even type out a rendering of that person's like favorite poem or a passage from a book. You can make one of those homemade book trackers with like the empty book spines for your friend or family member to write in the books that they read that year. You can make food, make baked goods or meal kits or even a meal plan. If you're a meal planner and you know and love someone who hates meal planning, but wishes they had one, make like, I don't know, like a little cookbook of your family favorite recipes, maybe some of their family favorite recipes and then create a couple versions of meal plans with like overlapping ingredients at a shopping list. If that is something that comes naturally to you, do you know how fun it would be for someone you love to get that who doesn't enjoy that? Make meals for someone's freezer. Make like homemade pie crust or cookie dough balls that someone can pull out of the freezer anytime. You can make spice mixes or homemade coffee syrups that you put in like thrift store mason jars. Make some kind of food. You might start, you know, either with the person and what they love or with something you personally enjoy making. Like for example, if you're a bread baker for the love, please just make your people a loaf of bread. Do you know how much people love homemade bread? Depending on your budget, you could just make the bread. But beyond that, if there is a little money beyond the bread, you could pair that loaf of bread with like a favorite tea towel or like flour sectile or a stick of really good salted butter, right? Thrift stores are piled high with baskets. So you could just get a few and fill them with bread for your people. The point here is make something. Making might be a really helpful lens for you. The second lens that you might try is help. What is a way you can offer someone help? Ideas here are, you know, you can help that person do chores or finish a project. Like if you're an organized friend and you know that your pal hates organizing, but she's been talking about like needing to clean out the basement or a big closet or like her mom's recently vacated house, you can gift your time and your organizational prowess. If you love to garden and you have a friend who doesn't, but also would love to have like cut flowers in her yard, gift her your green thumb. You can write like a sweet note and maybe wrap it up with a pair of gardening gloves or a spade or a pack of seeds to offer that. If you're like an organizing person or a cleaning person and you want to offer that, you could like write a note with a cute set of sponges or a bottle of Windex. You could even like make the Windex have your own label, you know, that's make the label personal or tie a tag on the bottle cleaner that says something like to be opened on the most epic closet clean out day ever with take out Chinese food after or something. I've also mentioned this before, but one of the one of the sweetest ways that you can give a gift of help is to think of something you enjoy doing that other people hate. For example, I hate researching stuff so much cause love my husband loves researching stuff. It is the greatest gift ever that he loves doing something I hate doing and it's so helpful for me too. So like, let's say you're a researcher, you could make that a gift to someone that you love. Like maybe your friend, you know, your friend is looking for a new washer and dryer and has mentioned it multiple times, but she keeps putting it off. You could gift her a printout of like washer and dryer research. You could make it fun, almost like a little choose your own adventure book, but helping someone do research who hates doing research, especially when you know them well enough to know what matters to them. Are you kidding me? That is a tremendous gift that really is just your time. It's something you're already really good at. You can help walk a dog, help babysit, help plant tomatoes when the season is right, help decorate a living room, help organize photos. You can give the gift of your help. So that's the second lens you could consider. The third lens that you might like is experience. Give an experience. Now obviously this one is not a new idea. It can also be very expensive, but outside of the typical things you're thinking of, like going to a theme park or a big concert or something that, you know, does cost a good bit of money. Let's think about experiences that are full of joy, but not dollars. You could schedule a day to go thrifting, go to bookstores, wander around a fun downtown. You could plan an experience like a craft night or a trivia night or a game night or a movie marathon night. Create an experience where you have a fun dinner party, where you make that person's all favorite foods. You can give the gift of an album release party or a book release party for an album or book that that person is really excited about. And all you do is like get together and like eat fun food and have silly decorations and like listen to the album or hold the book up or whatever. Start with that person. What would you love to do with them? Whether it's like with their family, your family, if it's just the two of you, it's a group of friends, it could even be that they want to experience solo. They don't get to be alone very often and love being alone. So you could create like a whole day for that person where you sort of figure out like a fun solo walk through a downtown if they like wandering, you know, around a city or like a hike on a new trail and it ends with a cup of coffee with you at the end or something like that. You can look through the lens of an experience. The fourth lens that you might enjoy looking through is encourage. How can you create a gift that encourages this person? You can write notes that are like dated for the first or last day of a month or a week or I don't know important dates in that person's life. And it's just words about how much you care about them or like a joke that you know is going to make them laugh or like favorite stories that you remember about them. You can encourage a person by writing notes kind of like how we do many pep talks here for that person to open when they're feeling a certain kind of way. So you could make notes that are labeled like read this when your children are too loud, read this when you're lonely, read this when you're excited about something you did that feels too small to celebrate. You know, create notes that meet the moment and encourage that person. You can encourage them with a jar of like qualities that you love about them written on little pieces of paper and they like pull one out every day or something. You can encourage by giving a friend or a family member that lives far away. Like, like imagine if they're a tea drinker, you give them like a dozen tea bags of like really good tea with a note that says these are for our tea phone dates. And then once a month you talk on the phone and you drink the same tea and you're together. How can you encourage someone, especially with words? Words are free man. Use them up. The fifth lens that you can look through this is one of my favorites and it is curate. What can you gather up specifically on purpose that can bring joy to someone in your life? So a playlist is a form of curation so that can count here too. But let's say you're friends with me and you know that I love birds. You could find all of the cute little bird things at like thrift stores or even like little birds you've collected in your own house and have like a sweet curation of bird products. They can be a mix of used things, new things, your things. But like curate a little gift based on something that a person loves. You can curate a list of the best things to pack for an international trip if you know that a friend or family member is going somewhere. You can curate a list of house things for that niece or nephew or sibling who's about to move into their first apartment or even like a little collection of thrifted things they might enjoy curated for their first home. You can curate snacks for the perfect movie night. You can curate a route through bookstores or gardening stores or parks or hiking trails that that person would love to explore. You can curate a list of the best pizza in your state and make it like a fun checklist for your pizza living friend. You can curate a blueberry muffin crawl through the bakeries in your town that all boast a good blueberry muffin because your friend loves a blueberry muffin. You can curate your favorite trader Joe's snack bundle or a movie list or a reading list for a person based on what they already love to watch or read. Gather together a collection of things or ideas that would bring that person joy. And your final lens to consider is remember. You can tap into nostalgia for practically nothing if not free and bring so much joy to a person in your life. So that's your last lens is remember. You can frame an old photo of you and the person. You can create like a little book full of stories or photos or memories kind of like a little scrapbook or stroll down memory lane. You can have a nostalgic dance party where you listen to all the music that that person loved from the year they graduated high school. You can recreate a memory or a photo or do something you used to do that you haven't done in years. You can make one of those old school photo collages we all had like almost our bulletin boards in our bedrooms. Make one now of your friend. Like look back and create something joyful from the memories with this person. All of these lenses make help experience encourage curate and remember they might require a little bit more time depending on what you're going to do. But they will almost certainly fill you with joy as you come up with them and you will definitely pour joy into that person that you're giving them to and they don't cost much of anything at all. Gift guides are great and they have their place for sure and getting something new that's a good time. But back to one of our rules to give in your season. This season feels like one where we might enjoy some connection and some homegrown versions of thoughtfulness as opposed to only just getting more stuff. Now stuff isn't bad and we all get stuff for people to some degree and we enjoy it. But there might be opportunities on your list of people who you want to give gifts to this season. We're tapping into those connections and and the relationship itself offers like a really beautiful gift opportunity you hadn't thought of yet. These lenses might help. So look through them see what shows up. Remember there's no such thing as a perfect gift so don't worry about finding the most amazing idea ever. Just think about it come up with something that sounds joyful and doable for your season of life and theirs and just see what happens. You might be surprised. Okay one final list to run through if you're looking for thoughtful gift giving when budgets are tight is a list of some kind of theme to put gift givers within a group like a family or a friend group on the same playing field. Now a lot of people set price limits on gifts which is great but these are themes that have a limit built into them that isn't necessarily about money. I've definitely been in a situation where I was the like hey can we have a cap on this person and I felt a little embarrassed about it. So presenting another kind of limit that's not money puts joy back into the giving without making anyone feel uncomfortable. So there are seven of these. There are seven of these themes that you could go with. Theme idea number one thrifted. All gifts have to be purchased at a thrift store a secondhand store. I kind of love that because like there's so many cool weird sometimes highly functional things that you can find at thrift stores. There might be like a cool purse or an oversized jacket or a collection of like coupe glasses for someone's bar card at home or a fun painting or like belts that come in every color. I don't know thrifted is a really fun theme and things at thrift stores are not terribly expensive on purpose. Theme idea number two food. The gift has to be some kind of food. You can make it buy it whatever but the gift has to be food. There's so much freedom and that kind of theme and an opportunity to create a lot of joy without spending a lot of money. Theme idea number three games. Everybody gets a game. It can be a board game or a card game or a travel game or a brain teaser game or like a book of Sudoku puzzles whatever. You can get creative by making your own game or by adjusting the board on a thrifted game to make it like personal and funny. But everybody everybody loves some kind of game and if you have that limit it's okay if it doesn't cost a lot of money right. Theme idea number four the dollar store. All gifts have to come from the dollar store. There's definitely a price limit there although you can certainly say that you can get as many things as you would like from the dollar store. They just have to come from the dollar store. There's a lot of creativity and fun that can happen there. Theme idea number five from your house. It's like a re-gifting holiday but there are a lot of great opportunities here too. You know maybe there's jewelry you don't you don't wear but you know your sister would actually really like it. Maybe there's a sweatshirt that your brother always comments on when you wear it and you're just going to give it to him. Like whatever the gift is it comes from everyone's house. Theme idea number six color. I love this. The price here can be flexible if you want to put a cap on it but can you imagine being like okay everybody your gift has to be green or whatever. Like I think that's so much fun. Limits create creativity and joy and honestly color does too. Color is one of the elements of joy from Ingrid's book. So what a great way to structure gifts with a group or like everybody picks a color from the rainbow. You like draw instead of drawing names you draw color like it could be so fun. And then finally theme idea number seven is white elephant or dirty santa. I love a gift exchange where all the gifts are weird. It's my favorite. Our church community group we have been together for several years now and there's this king charles mug like from king charles is it a cold and inauguration. It's not his crowning whatever it is but there's like a king charles mug that's been in rotation in our group for like five years now. It's in my cabinet currently. It's one of my favorite things. So if you're in a group of people whether it's siblings or extended family or co-workers or friends pitch a theme to the group you can suggest like hey to make gifts more fun this year and more flexible based on budgets let's do a theme of fill in the blank. These seven are obviously not the only options of course come off with whatever you like but these are good places to start. So again those seven themes are thrifted food games the dollar store your house a color or a silly gift exchange. As you think about gifts for specific people where a group theme might not be as appropriate you consider new lenses to make your gifts more intentional and joyful without making them more expensive so those lenses you can make your own but the lenses from today are make help experience encourage curate and remember and to help you have the right mindset as you start this process this project of thinking through gifts this year remember your five rules there's no such thing as a perfect gift so feel the freedom to just choose and enjoy the choice and let it go. Two give joyfully both within yourself and create joy for that person whether it's with abundance or color or surprise or whatever. Three give in your season recognizing that what you choose this year does not have to be true every year. Four treat holiday gifts like the projects that it is so you can actually enjoy it rather than just rush through it and then five don't apologize which puts the focus on you rather than on the person that you're wanting to bring joy to with your gift and that is thoughtful gift giving when budgets are tight. Are you really buying a car online on auto trader right now? Really I can get super specific with dealer listings and see cars based on my budget. You can really have it delivered or pick it up. I think kid is walking up the slide. Really? Auto trader buy your car online really. Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start. Thumbtack knows homes so you don't have to. Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin or what that clunking sound from your dryer is. With thumbtack you don't have to be a home pro you just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros see price estimates and read reviews all on the app. Download today. For today's a little extra something I want to tell you about my maps. Do y'all know about my maps? I could be the last one who knows about my maps but I did not know about them until just a couple of weeks ago and it changed how I planned a trip making it so much easier to have a budget friendly trip too. So if you already use my maps forgive me for being so behind but my maps is an offering of Google so it's free. Super easy if you already have a Google account but it's basically a way to gather up pins on a map color code them and it helps you decide how to best experience a place you're wanting to visit. So the way that I've learned to use it is to simply create a pin for everything in a city that I'm visiting that could be fun. Everything. You can create layers or categories within those pins if you want like here all the restaurant pins and then here's the shop be like there's a layer for restaurants there's a layer for shopping there's a layer for landmarks whatever but you just pin everything you think would be cool you don't think about where it is in the city just pin what you think is cool then because that list is on a map you can see where those places are grouped together so you can see that like certain places are some are not around anything else they're sort of outliers all far away so you're just going to be like you know what I'm going to scrap that one ramen place that sounded cool to try because it's not close to anything or if you're in a big city you can see where like all the walkable things are what requires public transit to get to it I think this is particularly helpful for like sightseeing trips or big places using my maps is the biggest win you can just see what's close together it's kind of like a brain dump for travel planning you just literally throw everything up there you see what's close to each other and you just start to organize it again I did not know that this existed until just a couple weeks ago and it has transformed the ease of gathering places to visit and eliminating what just doesn't quite fit so I just want to make sure y'all know about it I want you to know about my maps and that is our little extra something today all right now we have our lazy genus of the week this week it's Heidi from Temecula California Heidi writes I've started adding into the notes of my contacts my friends go to coffee orders maybe I just ask them outright what it is or maybe we've been out a couple times and I take note then if my friend is having a tough week or I just happen to have some margin I can drop a coffee coffee off to brighten their day it's such a simple way to make someone feel seen and cared for that there's no way I could keep track of all my friends coffee preferences floating in my head this is so brilliant and so kind and I love it so much I think a lot of us think about the gift of bringing a friend a coffee especially surprise one we kind of like the fact that it's a surprise but a coffee order is so personal that getting it wrong might keep us from making the choice that this solves that problem like just keep their orders in your phone with their contact info it's amazing I love this Heidi so thank you for sharing and congratulations on being the lazy genus of the week okay as we close let's have a mini pep talk for the monotony of everyday life really this pep talk is more of a story and a reminder so last weekend I went to New York City with Jamie Golden to celebrate her birthday and we spent some time in Central Park well there was this guy out there with a sign like a you know like a clapboard sign that said six minute poems you give this guy a topic of your choice and he'll write a poem for you and then you you pay him whatever you like well we were both like well we got to stop we got it we got to get a six minute poem so we did and since he had a little line in front of us we both had time to think about what our topic would be I knew that choosing something really specific would make a better poem and I also wanted something that felt singular to me right now so I chose carpooling this is my last year of driving my kids everywhere simply because Sam my oldest gets his license soon and next school year he's going to drive himself and Ben my middle to the same school they're both going to be in high school I don't like that sentence uh Annie my youngest she's still going to be attending our walkable elementary school and even when she gets to middle school though the high school and middle school they're right across the street from each other so chances are good she'll still get a ride with a brother and even if she is getting a ride for me it's just one kid in one school versus three kids in three schools like it is right now I mean I'm just I'm in the car all the time and the monotony of carpooling is coming to an end and in some ways I'm excited and some ways I'm like aw and I want to mark that so it was our turn I walked up to Zen the poet and I told him that I wanted a poem about this season of driving my kids everywhere and the bittersweet aspects to that I gave him a few details and a few minutes later he waved me over he slid this handwritten poem into like a little plastic sleeve for me to take and he said I've written thousands of poems over the years sitting out here and this is the first time that one made me cry so here is the six minute poem that Zen wrote for me in the middle of Central Park about carpooling mirrors and eyes and hair and fights and giggles and garbage and songs and gripes and locks and mud and belts and doors one day I'll be looking out the window and you'll ask me about my day and all I'll remember are yours isn't that so beautiful I'm going to post a photo of the handwritten poem itself with it's like the backdrop of the changing trees in Central Park I'm going to put that in the next podcast recap email if you want to see it that's the lazygeniuscollective.com slash listens but that's honestly my my pep talk to you today in the monotony of everyday life there is so much beauty in the ordinary the most beauty and when we can take a minute to just pause and remember that good is here right now even the things that drive us crazy that never seem to end they have power to bring contentment and joy where you are is a season maybe a super long difficult one but monotony it can be an opportunity for liturgy for deep grooves of awareness and contentment and presence and honesty wherever you are and that's a mini pep talk on the monotony of everyday life if this episode was helpful to you or if you've been looking for a way to support the show it would mean the world if you would share this episode with a friend or you can leave a kind review on apple podcasts both of those things seem small and in some ways they are but we all know starting small baby so thank you so much for listening sharing and supporting this work this podcast is part of the odyssey family and the office ladies network this episode is hosted by me kinder adachi and executive produced by kinder adachi jennifisher and angela kenzie special thanks to leah jarvis for weekly production if you'd like that podcast recap every other week be sure to sign up for the latest blazy listens email that goes out every other friday you can get that at the lazy genius collective dot com slash listens thanks guys for listening and until next time be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't i'm kinder and i'll see you next week you have you ever felt like you were living just a b or b plus life it's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a b minus or a c plus life because when you're living a b or b plus life you don't 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