Reset Layers
March 4, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Blood by Dr. Jen Gunter
Listening: The Milkman by Petey
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
New Work
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Killer Robots and Mass Surveillance
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Transcending Embarrassment & the pod is about Brain Eras
Reset Layers
Every morning I like to reset to zero.
After a quick little stretch-focused workout, I get the kettle going and put all the dishes and silverware away. I straighten and tidy anything within reach, and I take my pill (levothyroxine for my faulty thyroid), cleanse my mouthguard (for my faulty TMJ), open the living room blinds to let in some light, and commit myself to having a good, fulfilling day.
There are minor variations to this routine, especially if I’m on the road. And though I get up at 5am most days, if I have an flight (or the like) I’ll sometimes skip or breeze through a few steps.
But I find the process of getting things back to a baseline before the unpredictable disruptions of a new day soothing because I know that, bare-minimum, I’m beginning from a familiar stance. And I know that no matter what the day brings, I can return to that stance when I’m done.
There’s another layer of resetting in which I regularly engage: that of the deep-clean.
I work from home, so I can usually keep things orderly with just a little straightening here, a little dusting there. But chaos accrues in the gaps despite my best daily efforts, so periodic heavier lifts are necessary.
This typically happens about once a month. My partner and I divide up the apartment and go whole-hog on the organizing, scrubbing, dusting, laundering, and vacuuming. Some of the same happens more regularly, but this larger-scale, holistic effort leaves us with a satisfyingly new-feeling home that we’re able to enjoy for the day or two before the apartment feels “lived-in” again.
Up another layer is a “Spring Cleaning” sort of resetting, which involves not just cleaning, but a grand reorganization of our space and lives.
There’s a lot of trashing and donating at this level, as we don’t just put things in closets and scrub the floors—we take the time to reconsider what we actually need and what’s just sitting there, gathering dust and taking up valuable real estate.
This is a maybe quarterly activity, and it’s usually a multi-day, at times week-long endeavor. It feels amazing, though, because it psychologically frees up a lot of space (even more than it literally frees up), and it serves as a reminder to check in on our goals and expectations (and how they’ve changed since the last check-in), as well, which leaves us with recalibrated compasses that point toward more us-shaped destinations.
This is on my mind because we’re about to start in on that latter-most type of reset, and my brain is already buzzing with the possibilities and potential.
What no longer serves me? How do I want to be spending my time? What am I holding onto because I feel like I have to, or because it made sense for a previous iteration of me that no longer exists?
Every layer at every scale is important, though. Sometimes I’m shocked by just how much of a difference even the little daily reset makes, its value obvious when I skip it for even a few days and a disordered, messy confusion floods in, disrupting pretty much everything and reminding me why I adopted it as a ritual in the first place.
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What Else
If the weather gods aren’t messing with those of us in the Great Lakes region, today we should hit the 40s (F) and this Friday we should be stepping into a minimum of a week’s worth of 50+ degree weather.
Which is an astonishing thought after this much frigid cold, ice, and cartoonishly persistent snow!
After the mercury tips above 60 I’ll start whining about the heat, but for now I’m looking forward to wearing fewer layers, opening the windows, and enjoying clear sidewalks for a while.
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