Connection Matters

How are you doing? No—really.

Before answering that question—now and every day—check three things first: Have you been outside? Have you done something for another living being (a plant or pet counts)? Have you eaten something nourishing?

This simple ritual grounds the week’s readings, which explore fleeting connection, isolation, and the quiet ways happiness is made or missed.

Chekhov’s “Misery” shows us a man desperate to share his grief with anyone who’ll listen—and no one will. Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” offers fleeting moments of contact, fragments of conversation, the strange intimacy of strangers passing in a garden. And Waldinger’s 80-year Harvard study lands on a single finding: good relationships keep us healthier and happier. That’s it. That’s the secret.

The question isn’t whether you know this. The question is whether you’re living it.