The challenge is fairly simple. Each Sunday, write down on a piece of paper all of the good things that happened during the past week. Then, fold the paper and put it in a jar. On New Year's Eve, empty the jar and review the bright side of the year. I started this challenge twelve months ago and today I looked at the result. It was great. Most of the things I wrote down are somehow related to the people with whom I have shared this year. Very often this came in the form of nice and insightful conversations. Other notes capture instants in time which were particularly revealing or beautiful. And then there are a few that reflect the sheer good luck that I had in certain situations. One should more often look at the bright side :)

One piece of paper for each week of the year 2018, from S1 to S52

The jar

Make every second count. Every single one. And by making it count, I do not mean being active all the time but doing meaningful things. And that can be many things. Sleeping is meaningful. Mind-wandering is meaningful. Even not doing anything for a while is meaningful. But also working on motivating personal projects, sharing time with the people that are important to us, and creating instead of consuming. Time is a scarce resource. And it is not renewable. It is too valuable to spend it scrolling through an infinite sea of random content which, like a painkiller, is designed to provide temporal relief from repetitive daily routines.