.SOMETIMES RAW.

Hello Lovely,

Good morning. I am always with you and yet we seem to have lost touch. I understand that there are always things to do, places to go, opportunities to seize, dreams to realize and fires to fight but it is almost as if you have been avoiding me. Did we grow apart? I thought we were pretty close.

From distance, you seemed happy earlier this year and reminded me of a younger Daniela, one surer of herself and her place in the world. Is this true? Now, what happened? You bought a house. Wow! You love it, do you? So much nature. So much beauty. But are you really happy or have you just occupied yourself with urgency to avoid dealing with what is important? I ask because I care about you. I am not a stranger to you, Daniela but recent actions have made me feel like one. You are both wise and jaded enough to know the difference between acts of self-love and distractions offering temporary happiness. And yet you have consistently fallen into the trappings of comfort. When we last met, you had sparkling eyes, ambition, and unflinching clarity but all those distractions have muddied your heart. There is nothing where there these days. What happened? Oh, I remember, you told me. Stress. Pressure. The notion to perform at 100% in life at all times. Guess what, this cannot work. More importantly, what have you felt or learned? In my dreams, you are remarkable. Please do not allow life to get the better of you. There are things only you can do so you must do them. Look at your son. He is amazing and this is almost solely your work.

It is rare to have the ability and opportunity to build a significant life so please make the most of it. Giving in to the everyday pressure of mediocrity and smallness won’t get you to where you need to be. Hey, I know the gnawing feeling of unfulfillment is something you have been grappling with for a while now and you are prepared to completely retool your life. It will be a challenge but not impossible.

Things will change. Look what you have accomplished in your private life! It took you quite some time to get to this point and know exactly who you are so don’t resent the journey. The secret to leading a worthwhile life is to make a few meaningful and thoughtful decisions every day and let go of the rest. And, as you learn to detach yourself from this web you will come to realize your insignificance. All of this, my dear, existed before you were born and will continue to thrive long after your departure. So, optimize your time here for that which has the potential to outlive you.

You must focus on yourself, your son, your family, and friends and leave the rest behind. There is no need to tolerate ignorance. Everything will work out, believe me. You will be fine. You have this little pure soul who depends on you and walks next to you in life wherever you go. Isn’t that everything? 

Breathe. Do not forget that this life is yours and first and foremost belongs to you. You have some power over it and can undo many of these wrongs if you choose to. Guess what? When you were born the first debt you inherited was your privilege. Then came the burden of expectations placed on you. This was soon followed by the power others yielded over you. And the final debt is one that grows with each passing day: Time. You wonder about your purpose here but have you considered that perhaps it is to simply walk this earth with joy? If you can say no to anything which does not inspire happiness or peace in you then you are free from all debts. Remember that you can get anything you want but not everything you want. What choices will then lead you to your best life? Aren’t you living it already? I think you do. 

You have already learned through all your dramas that humans are transient beings. We all come and go bringing varying measures of joy, pain, longing, and wisdom into the lives of others. This is the natural order of things akin to the ebb and flow of the sea. This is also why you should rethink certain things, choices, and options. It will shape your entire life so do this with care. In all this change, happiness then lies in the constant.

I see you in the mirror every day and wonder about the love that will make you feel this way once again. I need you to regain control of your heart again. To open it. You were made to love and be loved and yet on some days you seem to believe that you are incapable or undeserving of it. Where there were wounds once, now there are scars. But all scars will be loved. I promise. What do you see when you look at your reflection? I hope you can see everything worthy of love in you. I see this every day and it makes me believe in the best of you. I will always believe in you. 

All my love, 

Yours. 

If you were to die tomorrow, what one thing (or few things) would you be most disappointed that you weren’t able to complete, change, or achieve? Here is some of my wisdom: I don’t need praise or attention to have value.

• Cultivate twelve people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.
• When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
• If winning becomes too important in a game, change the rules to make it more fun. Changing rules can become the new game.
• The best way to get a correct answer on the internet is to post an obviously wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you.
• Don’t wait for the storm to pass; dance in the rain.
• We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years. A long game will compound small gains to overcome even big mistakes.
• A wise man said, “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
• To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met, move them onto a slow internet connection. Observe.
• Take note if you find yourself wondering “Where is my good knife? Or, where is my good pen?” That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
• About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
• No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
• Don’t ever work for someone you dont want to become.
• Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.
• If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them money.
• Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
• When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
• Criticize in private, praise in public!
• Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson, you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive, that means you still have lessons to learn.
• Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
• Immediately pay what you owe to vendors, workers, and contractors. They will go out of their way to work with you first next time. Also, always be friendly to vendors, workers, and contractors.
• The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”
• Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
• Never ask a woman if she is pregnant. Let her tell you if she is.
• Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two.
• You’ll get 10x better results by elevating good behaviour rather than punishing bad behaviour, especially in children, colleagues, and animals.
• Spend as much time crafting the subject line of an email as the message itself because the subject line is often the only thing people read.
• Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
• A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
• Make stuff that is good for people to have.
• 90% of everything is crap. If you think you don’t like opera, romance novels, TikTok, country music, or vegan food, keep trying to see if you can find the 10% that is not crap. Real love is not.
• Thank the teacher who changed your life.
• You can’t reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.
• Buy used books. They have the same words as the new ones. Also libraries.
• You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.
• Take the stairs. Always take the stairs.
• When you arrive at your room in a hotel, locate the emergency exits. It only takes a minute.
• The only productive way to answer “what should I do now?” is to first tackle the question of “who should I become?”
• It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.
• Art is whatever you can get away with.
• For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.
• Don’t wait in line to eat something famous. It is rarely worth the wait.
• To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met, move them to a slow internet connection. Observe.
• Do something strange. Make a habit of your weird.
• Don’t believe everything you think you believe.
• When introduced to someone make eye contact and count to 4. You’ll both remember each other.
• Take note if you find yourself wondering “Where is my good knife? Or, where is my good pen?” That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
• When you are stuck, explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make “explaining the problem” part of your troubleshooting process.
• Your group can achieve great things way beyond your means simply by showing people that they are appreciated.
• Spend time in nature. Especially with kids.
• You are as big as the things that make you angry.
• Time and space are limited. Remove, give away, throw out things in your life that dont spark joy any longer in order to make room for those that do.
• Focus on directions rather than destinations. Who knows their destiny? But maintain the right direction and you’ll arrive at where you want to go.
• Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.
• You can do something now to live the life you want to live.
• I don’t have to live like everybody else. In fact, I am happier if I don’t.

*an article I dedicate to my brother Thomas Weiss, who I dearly love and look up to when it comes to anything numbers. And a lot more, too.

Sometimes it feels like the things we learned in school are useless and nothing drives that point home more than the countless math rules that do not apply to our real adult lives. In fact, when you graph the number of mathematical principles that disappoint us over time, it is a monotonically increasing line. Like all other things in life. My brother helped me with my maths and statistics endeavours when I worked on my Bachelor- and Master’s degrees and I most certainly caused his hair to turn grey a bit faster. I have a couple of ideas where maths comes in handy, though.

1. Thanks to COVID, everyone now understands that describing yourself as postive on a dating app is a negative, but to be honest, it’s always been annoying.
2. A pizza can be evenly divided into eight slices, but it is only meant to serve two. Or one. Your target weight is just a number, and some numbers aren’t even real. Or rational!
3. There are no perfect numbers. They are all annoying, especially when you are the one who got stuck dividing up the check at a group dinner again.
4. You may have been taught that the average is the mean when, in fact, it is usually the really hot or rich ones that are mean.
5. Subtracting things doesn’t always make them smaller. For example, when I subtracted shaving from my schedule, that gnawing feeling that I will die alone got exponentially bigger.
6. To find out if a number is divisible by three, you don’t have to add up all the digits in the number. You can just use Google.
7. On the subject of angels, Acute angles can be more than 90 degrees. The things is, I look cute from all angles. Obtuse doesn’t mean more than 90 degrees; it means you don’t believe in wearing masks. Straight angles are exactly 180 degrees. But is anyone truly exactly 180 degrees?
8. The sum of the interior of a triangle isn’t 180 degrees; it’s 20 degrees below zero when you’re the one being shut out of the throuple. (FYI: A throuple is a relationship between three people who have all unanimously agreed to be in a romantic, loving, relationship together with the consent of all people involved)
9. You can’t just multiply by zero to cancel everything out. Covid, for example, you have to subtract.
10. The butterfly method isn’t to compare fractions. It’s a sex thing. I won’t explain.
11. Cubing things doesn’t increase their volume — there isn’t enough cheese. There is never enough cheese.
12. And when you get to the root of it, being a square doesn’t mean you have more to offer. It just makes you very, very boring.
13. Items contained within parenthesis are afterthoughts and do not come first (no matter how much your boyfriend wants to make a big deal of that micropenis comment you MEANT AS A JOKE).
14. Don’t solve for your X. They need to figure it out on their own.
15. The Pythagorean theorem… actually, I have no idea what this is. But Pythagoras sounds hot. Call me, you Greek God, you.
16. A negative times a negative does not equal a positive. It equals an ugly divorce.
17. A positive times a positive also isn’t positive. It equals a couple with a joint Instagram account that posts inspirational quotes. And no, you don’t think their kid is cute, especially after the baby content started replacing the dog content.
18. But who can afford kids? Unless the absolute value is the only relevant measure of net worth, in which case the government owes people money for student loan debt. And don’t even get me started on the cost of healthcare, which could not be more relevant right now. Because the probability of getting COVID is not the frequency of COVID divided by the total population. But it’s worth noting that percentages can be higher than 100. For example, I’m 700% sure the government is not transparant, follows their own agenda which might be unethical, only looks out for the 1% and does not care about the cost and collateral damage of anybody else. As I was saying, who can afford kids?

NOTE: There are some exceptions where math rules do apply. For example, in division, the top does go into the bottom, pending the bottom’s consent, of course. Actually, that’s the only one.