Loyal Subscribers

June 8, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you build loyal subscribers?
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I find it interesting that most of these blog prompts have nothing to do with me, such as today’s prompt about building loyal subscribers. I have no idea how to build loyalty, have no idea if anyone has even subscribed to my blog. I do know a few friends get my blog by email, which isn’t really fair — they get to keep up with me on a daily basis, and I don’t know what’s going on with them. You’d think they’d be kind enough to reciprocate with their own blog, wouldn’t you? (I’m being facetious. If I want to know what’s going on with them, I could simply call, and I don’t, so who’s the one who isn’t being fair?)

Actually, according to WordPress, I do have some subscribers, and a few more have subscribed in the past few days, so thank you for subscribing!

As for building loyalty — apparently, somewhere along the line I have done so since I see many of the same names in comments and “likes,” but as I’ve mentioned before, I have no idea why anyone reads what I write, though I do appreciate everyone who does. It makes blogging seem so much less like throwing a tiny penlight out into the great darkness of the unknown and more like connecting with friends.

There are some people who have been with me almost from the beginning — starting from the time I wrote about writing, then tumbling into the whole morass of grief with me, and still showing up now that my posts range from stream of consciousness to gardening. Truly, hands across the nations! (Did I mention how grateful I am for you? Well, it bears repeating.)

I might not know how to purposely build a following, but I know how not to build subscribers by the millions — don’t be controversial. Almost all people who garner those sorts of numbers and that sort of loyalty do so by talking about things that gets people emotional, and I don’t want to do that. I know how a lot of my readers think, and I’d just as soon not get into discussions that either get my ire up or theirs. (And I don’t like to have to think of tactful ways of saying I disagree, so I don’t.)

Another way not to build loyal subscribers is to not show a bias because bias automatically gives people a connection to you. It’s almost impossible not to show a bias, and I’m sure mine shows occasionally, though my bias tends to be for irony and intelligence and truth-seeking rather than for any movement or ideology. And I have a definite bias against hypocrisy, emotion that passes as fact, and regimentation of thought. I spent most of my life around people who loved to force people to think their way, so I became adept at changing midstream partly to keep the peace and partly because I didn’t care enough either way to argue the point.

But then, can anyone tell if they are really bias-free? I’m not sure. It seems ingrained so that a biased person acts as if their bias is the truth rather than simply their way of seeing the truth. Case in point: one popular quasi news show has been bleeding viewers because a lot of people don’t like its far-left liberal slant, and all the journalists on the show profess to have no idea there is a slant — they thought they were being impartial.

Seems like a good idea for me to keep keeping away from controversial topics — that way I can keep my bias to myself. And I can keep the readers I have rather than trying to grow a larger subscriber’s list, which I don’t know how to do anyway.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, photography, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Minimalism

June 3, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Do you believe in minimalism?
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I’m not sure I believe in minimalism. I mean, I know it’s a “thing,” so I believe in its reality. I just don’t know how important it is as a universal lifestyle. Nor do I think it’s something I want to believe in for myself. Minimalism, by definition, is a philosophy centered on living intentionally with only what is essential. Sounds bleak to me. Not to take part in the abundance of today’s world? Not to celebrate small treats and treasures of the day?

Yep. Sounds bleak.

For artists and art lovers, minimalism is about simple-seeming artworks that the artist wants appreciated for the shapes and materials used rather than for some sort of narrative. Minimalism nowadays, though, generally refers to the way one lives. I imagine what is essential to a minimalist lifestyle depends on the person. I bet a lot of minimalists have more luxury items than I do — televisions, streaming services, fancy bathrooms, whatever. Of course, most people don’t consider those things luxury items, but a lot of what we take for granted truly is luxury — running water in the house, an “inhouse” rather than an outhouse, space to move around your home without being elbowed by others, heating systems, cooling systems, clothes washers and dishwashers. For thousands of years, these would have been considered unimaginable luxuries. Anything beyond these “basics” would have been utter opulence.

Hmm. I think I’m getting away from my premise. Or perhaps not. A true minimalist would be living in the woods, without any of these trappings of civilization, so I tend to think what the minimalists of today are really looking for is to own their possessions, not to be owned by them. Having a lot of things can weigh one down. Having to take care of a lot of things can take up time better spent on other things such as new experiences.

It’s funny to think how after Jeff died, I got rid of about half of all we owned together as well as all he owned by himself except for a small box of things I promised to keep plus a few items I couldn’t get rid of. Then, after my father died, I got rid of about half of what was left, just enough to fit in a single storage unit. My goal was to eventually get rid of everything and just live with what fit in my car. I liked the idea of not owning anything, mostly, I think, because I didn’t how I was going to live on my minimal income and I didn’t want to keep paying to store my personal effects.

Long before I could get rid of everything in my storage unit, I had the great good fortune to buy a house, which ended that minimally minimalist aspiration. So then I started in a time of “upsizing.” Besides my vintage car, I now own a house and a yard and a garage and furniture and appliances and tools and oh, so very many things. (A lot of the furnishings and such came from other people downsizing, so I suppose it evens out in the end.)

A few weeks ago, I responded to another blog prompt about Minimalist Living and mentioned that to a great extent, I do live a minimalist lifestyle, but as I said, I don’t call it that. I call it not buying things I didn’t need. I call it living debt-free, not buying anything I can’t afford right now. I call it using things up and not wasting anything.

Every once in a while, I think about owning all this stuff. Not worrying about it; just thinking what it means. My house, after all, couldn’t fit in a storage unit if it would ever come to that. But part of my “minimalism” feeling is realizing I won’t have to dispose of anything I own. With luck, I’ll be here until my end, and then it will be someone else who has the headache of figuring out what to do with it all.

Meantime, I live quietly, frugally (though frugal connotes a sense of deprivation, I don’t deprive myself of anything I want; I simply don’t want a whole lot).

So does this mean I believe in minimalism after all? No. I don’t believe in any movement. I was living small before there was such as thing as minimalism. I don’t need a name (or permission!) to live the way I am living.

To be honest, if you saw my house and my yard, minimalism would never enter your mind. You’d see (as people always tell me they see) comfort, coziness, cleanness. And lushness!! A fully modernized house with old-fashioned touches and set in a gorgeous yard is definitely not minimalist.

It is utter luxury.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, culture, home, house, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 12 Comments »

Eye-Catching

June 1, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
Go on a walk today and share a photo of something that catches your eye.
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I thought I’d respond to this blog prompt by actually doing what it asked. I went on a walk! First time in I don’t know how long, though it must have been a very long time because the neighbors have been waiting outside for me to stop by, and well, as you can see, that didn’t have a good outcome for them.

I was only going to walk a couple of blocks just to say that I walked, but I ended up walking a couple of miles. It reminded me of what I liked about walking — the lovely morning, the clean smell, the soft air, the blue skies, the gentle breeze. But it also reminded me of why I have a hard time forcing myself to get back to daily walking — utter boredom. Nothing to see other than what I’ve already seen a thousand times. (Well, the family on the bench was a bit different configuration; they are often rearranged and dressed to memorialize the season with hearts, Easter baskets, or Santa hats.) In previous living situations, when I walked for miles each day, I was able to find isolated paths, hiking trails, and vistas within walking distance of where I lived, but now all I see are the same houses, the same parked cars, the same cracked pavements, the same brown fields.

I’d walked all over town during my first years here, and because of a definite dog problem in this area, I soon learned to stick to one guaranteed safe route. But oh, so utterly boring seeing the same thing over and over and over again. (It’s why I stopped going to the library — the thousandth time I saw those same books did me in.) When I do manage to get out to walk (hard in the summer because I use up my energy on yard work), I try to think of it as a walking meditation, paying attention to the simple act of walking, but then I become aware of my slightly unsteady knees, and that’s no fun.

But that wasn’t today. Today was a real treat. It was also nice to find out I can still walk at least that far without any trouble. Added to the benefit, I exchanged a few words with one neighbor and made a point of stopping to visit with a friend.

Tomorrow, I get back to yard word, so there won’t be time or energy or inclination for a spur of the moment walk. Today was a rare day off, taken because in a few days, I won’t have any days off. The larkspur are finished flowering (which is odd because usually at the end of May they are at the height of their beauty). Soon the seed pods will form, which means collecting the seeds and pulling up the dead larkspur — not an easy task since there are so many of them. And after that, it’s a matter of planting new flower seeds for the summer, buying new plants, or transplanting overcrowded plants to fill in empty spots.

Later in the summer, there will be more color, and perhaps a real explosion of color come fall when the chrysanthemum bloom. Actually, it’s the lack of things to see outside of my own yard that helped me overcame my reluctance for work-heavy landscaping in order to have something fun to see. Even in a time where so many flowers are finished for the season, there are new areas that are flowering.

In fact, the thing that most caught my eye during today’s excursion (besides my skeletal neighbors, that is) was my own wildflower garden leading up to my back door.

These yellow coreopsis (or coreopsises or even coreopses for you Latin afficionados) started with only a couple of seedlings, and now look! So prolific and so sunny.

Truly eye-catching.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, gardening, home, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 11 Comments »

Unlimited Budget

May 31, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you had an unlimited budget for 24 hours, what would you do?
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This blog prompt should have been a no brainer. Unfortunately, because I overthink everything, I have a hard time with hypothetical questions, this one most of all. For example, I started out wondering what it means by “budget.” To me (and to the dictionary), a budget is basically a financial plan that helps a person understand what money they have to spend every month, allocates a sufficient amount of income for fixed expenditures such as rent and utilities, and helps control spending to avoid going into debt. But that definition doesn’t fit the postulated scenario at all. I suppose I could make out a budget for an infinite amount of income for a day without actually spending anything, but it seems a waste to go through all that simply for one day’s worth of phony money.

So if the question isn’t about a budget as such, does it mean simply having an infinite amount of money to spend for one day? If so, how does the money appear? A credit card with no limit? If so, who pays the bill? Or does the money appear in my banking account? If so, how does the depositer know how much I will be spending?

Do I know ahead of time what day that “unlimited budget” will show up so I can plan how to use the largess? Or will it just appear one day, leaving me to wing it, and hoping I don’t get so overwrought by the stress of it all that I blow the whole deal?

And how does one spend the money? Go online and book airline trips and cruises for a future day? Will the travel plans still be available when the time comes, or will they have disappeared along with that “unlimited budget” day?

How would a credit card work anyway? The charges don’t always show up the same day as an order is placed, so if I were to buy a whole lot of stuff at a mall or online or wherever, there’s a chance that once the “unlimited budget” deal expired, I’d get stuck with a bill for things I would never have bought in the first place.

It would make sense to buy property or some other tangible asset, but I know for a fact, one cannot buy any property in a single day. Or maybe one can if one has that “unlimited budget” at one’s disposal. But still, I tend to think not. Realtors, lawyers, sellers, escrow folk and everyone else involved in a major sale don’t work on a moment’s notice.

I would think a good use of the budget would be to write checks to local non-profits, but would the money still be there when they cashed the checks? It doesn’t seem like it would be, and I have a hunch if I went to the bank and got trunk loads of cash to hand out to those groups, I would get into a whole lot of trouble. First of all, you can’t take out too much cash from a bank without dealing with a lot of paperwork. Second of all, unless the organizers were greedy and grabbed the cash for themselves, they’d certainly have questions about its legitimacy.

It all seems like too much headache.

In the end, I suppose I’d just buy what I normally buy on any given day, which is . . . not a single thing.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 3 Comments »

Profound Advice

May 29, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s the most profound piece of advice you’ve been given? Did you take it?
View all responses

WordPress, the host of my blog, is starting to pull out all sorts of tricks to get us more involved, or so I imagine, since people tend not to like long-form blogging anymore, seeming to prefer the photos, quick clips, and brief comments posted on most social networking sites. Some of what WordPress is doing is fun — for example, I won a “streak freeze” badge, which if I’m reading it right, if I miss a day of blogging activity, it still counts as an active day. It won’t matter to me and my personal stats, though. If I miss a day, I’m honest enough to admit it, if only to myself, but so far this year, I’ve posted each day. (149 days in a row so far.)

Oddly, though WordPress does keep tabs of my posting “streak,” they’ve only been counting the past ten days for their new activity badge, so according to that I’m on a 10-day streak.

Another thing they are doing, besides the badges and different challenges, is listing the blogs I posted on a particular day. Supposedly, I’ve only posted five times on a May 29th, but they don’t seem to include the ten years prior to 2016 when I was blogging every day. If I really cared, of course, I could go back and find those posts for myself, but I don’t. Don’t care, I mean. The past is the past.

Still, I did check out a few of the previous May 29 posts that they listed, and I came across an interesting one that seems to fit today’s blog prompt. In the post, When You Have to Go, I mentioned all the different places I went when I had to “go” during my cross-country trip, and I found a bit of advice that I’d forgotten. I don’t even remember who told me, but it was profound to me, anyway. She suggested that when I was camping, I should take a quart yogurt container into the tent for late night emergencies. The container easily contours to fit, and the cover made it spill proof. I followed her advice, and it truly was miraculous! I keep a container in my house in case of plumbing problems, which has also been a boon.

Okay, so the advice wasn’t profound in the sense of emotional or philosophical depth, or of something with far-reaching significance, and I’m sure it wasn’t the most profound advice I’d ever been given (though I can’t think of any such advice offhand), and yet, when you have to go, there’s nothing more profound than a place (or a yogurt container) to find relief.

Incidentally, the photo attached to this post is one I took at the Kohler Design Center located in Kohler, Wisconsin. If you look closely, you will see that the sculpture, which took up an entire wall, was created from dozens of stacked toilets.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, How to, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , . 11 Comments »

The Perfect Road Trip

May 24, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
How do you plan the perfect road trip?
View all responses

The perfect road trip, obviously, is the one that’s perfect for you, so my experience might not be applicable. For one thing, I had years to plan since I was taking care of my aged father at the time and couldn’t take off even if I had wanted to. For another thing, grief still lay heavily on me, so I wouldn’t have enjoyed the trip even if I could have taken off. For yet another thing, it was great having such a long time to plan because a big part of a road trip is in the planning.

And the not planning.

I had originally wanted to do an epic hiking trip, such as one of the long trails or a walk across the country or anything that would take me out of myself and perhaps change both me and the trajectory of my life. When it turned out that I couldn’t do an epic hike (too much water to carry and not enough stamina), I decided to walk across the country my own way by driving from campsite to campsite and from hiking trail to hiking trail. That way, I got the feel of a lot of different places as well as the feel of a doing a long hike without actually hiking the whole way.

Once I’d decided on the project, then it was time to decide what gear I needed for where I wanted to go. Since I left in February, my itinerary was obvious — along the southern edge of the country. Then, since I had no camping supplies, the next step was to research what I needed. I had a lot of backpacking equipment in preparation for the backpacking hike that never happened (except for one overnight hike and hundreds of day trips), but no car camping gear, such as a livable tent and heavier clothes. I of course posted all this preparation online, and some people found it amusing to watch what I was doing. I suppose it was amusing, my buying for a camping trip when I’d never camped before, especially since I might not even have been able to go on the long trip. But the preparation was important to me regardless of what might have happened in what at the time was an unforeseeable future.

I knew a lot of the spots where I wanted to stop — mostly national parks and national monuments, but also people I wanted to visit. (Many of my online friends volunteered to host me. Offline people warned me about going to stay with people I’d never met face to face, but in every case, the person I met in real life was exactly what they were like online, so it felt like what it was — a continuation of an established friendship.) I also left a lot unplanned because I didn’t want to keep to a strict schedule and I knew there would always be tantalizing vistas and advertisements along the road to drag me off course.

I was lucky; since I had no home at the time (my father had died, the house sold, and I had yet to decide where I was going to live), the trip didn’t have to be a quickie affair. In fact, I was gone almost six months. I might never have returned, but I had promised to do a dance performance, which put me on the clock, but it was still a lengthy trip. All the preparation helped make the whole adventure easier, including the “not planning” I mentioned above. As I travelled, people I didn’t know but who knew me through my grief blogs, invited me to stop by, which added surprising twists to my journey. In one case, a woman I met at a campground invited me to visit, and I decided what the heck, and that had surprising twists in a different way since I felt as I’d stumbled into a Southern Gothic story. Whew! I was never so glad to set on down the road.

I also didn’t camp as often as I’d planned because some of the campgrounds were closed or they didn’t feel right, or they were too full or too empty, but that’s where the money I’d set aside for a motel fund came in handy. As I’d learned, always plan for a change of plans.

If you can’t take a road trip and wish to do one vicariously, you can follow my trip here: Road Trip 2016 | Bertram’s Blog. It truly was a remarkable experience, both the road trip itself and the fun of planning it.

You can also plan a road trip without ever intending to go anywhere. Pick a route, follow along the road with Google maps or — heaven forbid! — a paper map, then see what photos and information you can find. With all the online resources available, there is a lot you can see in the palm of your hand.

Oh, I almost forgot — the most important thing when planning the perfect road trip? Having fun!

Chiricahua National Monument

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in Adventure, blogging, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Questioning Reality

May 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a moment that made you question reality?
View all responses

A moment that made me question reality? There never was such a moment in my life, nothing like seeing someone out of time or out of place, seeing an alien or ghosts, finding gaps in my personal timeline. Nothing fun or lighthearted like that. But there are a couple of current events with historical overlays that are seriously making me question reality.

I’ve been reading a novel based in occupied France during World War II, and of course, there’s the whole story of antisemitism and concentration camps. That’s normal for such a book since those things happened back then. They are part of the story.

Then I take a break, go online and read about the growing antisemitism in this country. Even more horrific is that two candidates in Texas are using as their platform the promise of concentration camps for Jews. What the heck?? I thought we’d finished with that, though sadly, with the increasing population of Muslims and Islamism galloping across the country, it sort of makes sense that they would be selling the idea. But no one has to buy it. Jews are more a part of this country than Islamists. Hello? Judeo-Christian tradition anyone?

As if that’s not bad enough, I’ve been reading about the origin of the marines, and especially their hymn. I’d always thought “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” was just a poetic way of saying “From sea to shining sea.” But no. Those were two battles fought by the marines. During the Mexican-American war in 1895, the Marines seized the Chapultepec Castle, aka the Halls of Montezuma.

And the shores of Tripoli? In the 18th century, Muslim pirates from the Barbary Coast (The North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers) attacked ships in the Mediterranean, ransoming them for huge amounts of money as well as demanding bribes for letting ships use international waters. It had been the practice for countries simply to pay the extortionists to appease them. In fact, the newly formed USA had been paying over 20% of its revenue to the Muslims, but when pirates upped their demands, Thomas Jefferson refused to pay. So in 1801, the Pasha, who believed that all nations who would not acknowledge Islamic authority were sinners and that it was his right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, declared war on the USA. That was the first Barbary war. The second came fifteen years later.

And now? Really? Another Barbary war? It’s not called that, of course, but what we have is another Islamic nation of pirates extorting “tolls” from ships in international waters. Or they’re trying to, anyway.

This isn’t about the truth or even what you or I believe. It’s about the unreality of what’s going on today.

Antisemitism and concentration camps?

Islamic pirates?

Really? Really?

It’s as if age-old evils are bubbling to the surface of reality like marsh gas. Or maybe we’re stuck in a time loop of forever wars. Or . . . who knows. All I know is sometimes it feels as if none of this is real. And for sure, it does make me question reality.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in culture, history/myth, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 5 Comments »

The Venerable Vegetable

May 22, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a word or phrase that annoys you?
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There used to be many words and phrases that annoyed me, constructions such as “110%” and “intestinal fortitude,” but those instances seem so innocuous now that other words have begun to be used half to death (to the death of the word, that is), words like fascist and nazi and racist and whatever happens to be the phobe of the day.

I don’t know if I’m getting used to words that are so overused that they’ve become meaningless or if I’m less critical or . . . who knows. All I know is that there are now fewer words that irk me. And yet there is one word that I will never, ever use. Will never, ever hear without my teeth gritting or feeling the word scrape down my back like some unseen claw.

I can avoid other words, even the most hateful and prevalent, because people I’m around in real life don’t use them, and if I’m reading the words online, I can quickly skim past them before they sneak in under my skin.

But there is that one word, a word I can barely manage to even type, so I’ll close my eyes and hope I get it right. “Veggies.” There. I did it. Whew! The very sight, the very sound of that mawkish word gags me, but it is now universal. It’s as if no one knows how to say or write or spell the word “vegetables” anymore. I mean that literally. I am the only person I know who says “vegetables.” I can understand urging small children to eat their “veggies,” but when said by an adult to an adult, it seems . . . disrespectful.

Are vegetables really that onerous that they need an infantile nickname? Are we in such a hurry that we can’t manage to say the whole of the venerable “vegetable?” And it is a venerable word. It comes from the Medieval Latin word vegetabilis, meaning “growing, flourishing, or full of life.” It was used from the Middle Ages on to denote all plants, not just edible ones, because plants are capable of life and growth as opposed to inert minerals.

And so what do we have today instead of life and growth and vigor? The cringeworthy “veggies,” which means absolutely nothing.

I realize I am one of the few purists left when it comes to words. Oh, I know the argument, that language is ever evolving, and I understand that. I would just prefer that it evolved around other words I don’t have to hear every day even from people I like.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Erasing Movies

May 20, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you could erase one movie from your memory and watch it again for the first time, which one would it be?
View all responses

I found this blog prompt amusing because except for a few movies that I’ve seen multiple times, such as “Let it Ride” and “The Princess Bride,” I’ve pretty much erased every movie I’ve ever seen from memory, so seeing any of them again would be seeing them for the first time. I didn’t purposely erase them, you understand. Life did. Time did. In fact, the only titles I remember are the two listed above.

When Jeff and I first moved to an area where the only television programming we could get was through cable, we decided to splurge and sign up for a premium movie package. Back then, when such channels were new, we had forty to fifty new movies to watch every month. As time went on, and more channels were created and more deals made, the new offerings became less and less until there were only a handful of new movies to watch each month. So we watched a lot of movies over and over again.

Before then, I’d seldom gone to the movies because I preferred to read since I could set my own pace, and I never even owned a television until Jeff and I got together, so movie watching was new to me. I think we watched just about every movie ever made until . . . hmm. I don’t remember until when.

I could watch movies if I wanted — I have hundreds of movies that Jeff had collected and although I never use it, I do have a television. Unfortunately, movie-watching doesn’t have the same effect when you watch them alone as they do when you watch them with someone who has the same level of appreciation. Besides, I seem to have erased the idea of movie watching from memory as well as the movies themselves. Despite the television’s blank eye staring at me, I never even consider watching a movie.

Perhaps someday I will watch some of those collected movies again, but until then, the movie erasure continues, so that when I do watch them, they will be new.

Not that it matters if I do remember. I like knowing ahead of time what is happening — I’m past the stage in my life where nail-biting tension has any allure. I like seeing the action, like knowing as it is happening what the characters will be facing before they do since it adds an extra level of participation. Oddly, I don’t like either in my life — not tension, and certainly not knowing the future, which if known, would probably bring with it a whole lot of tension.

So I guess, to answer the question: there isn’t any specific movie I would like to see again for the first time. As of right now, there isn’t any movie I want to see at all.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, culture, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 7 Comments »

A Quiet Feeling of Contentment

May 19, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a simple pleasure in life that brings you joy?
View all responses

I looked up the meaning of joy because I was curious if my personal meaning matched the prevalent meaning, and it appears to be the same. To me, joy is an intense feeling, a kinetic emotion of delight and elation and even jubilation. I call it a kinetic emotion because it seems to be one of movement, an uplifting rather than a more static feeling of perhaps contentment or satisfaction.

Nothing anymore gives me that kinetic feeling of joy, nor does much of anything make me feel the lowering kinetic emotions such as anger and angst and outrage. I’m usually balanced somewhere in the middle rather than clinging to a vastly swinging emotional pendulum, which is how I like it.

There are many simple activities that bring me satisfaction, that take me out of myself and absorb my attention. I used to go to the library all the time, but I’ve taken against that simple pleasure, and so I find other things to do rather than spend all my time reading. Daily blogging, obviously, is one thing that takes up time once dedicated to reading. (I say obviously because . . . here I am!)

I’ve also bought a bunch of pencil puzzles books, a deal since they are outdated magazines, but that’s certainly not a problem since they’re all new to me. There are plenty of different kind of puzzles to keep my mind active, and I tend to think doing puzzles is better for mental stimulation than reading is.

Another activity I’m getting back into is paint-by-number. I used to get a kit occasionally when I was a child, and always enjoyed them, but then they disappeared for decades. My sister sent me a couple of kits for Christmas a few years ago, and that got me started again. They make me feel as if I am actually painting when all I am doing is coloring with paints, but filling in all those shapes satisfies something in me — my sense of order, perhaps.

Doing puzzles seems to be replacing reading, though I do read the books I have in the house especially when I eat. (I can’t seem to develop the habit of sitting down at a table by myself to eat. I know it’s supposed to be better for me, but it seems too bizarre and maybe too earthy to do nothing but concentrate on eating, which leads me to believe I don’t really like to eat.) And doing paint-by-number seems to be replacing computer games, though I still check in with a hidden object game most days.

And, of course, there is gardening. How could I have forgotten that, especially since I just came in from watering my plants and picking a few weeds.

Doing simple things gives my life a sense of balance, peace, and sometimes satisfaction, though the satisfaction doesn’t come from the doing so much as the having done. Seeing a picture come to life, finishing a puzzle book and starting a new one, seeing flowers growing in my yard and basking in the greenness all give me something better than joy. They give me a quiet feeling of contentment.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

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