Three New Leaves

Enjoy it.

I’m on the road to the tiny town of Comfort, Texas this weekend, landing in time for what I know will be two sunny days for two beautiful people. This isn’t my first wedding, and echoes of the last one—the food! the wine! the dancing!—remind me how when the moment is right, when the stars are aligned and the special occasion all buts calls for it, it’s okay to indulge.

It’s fine, even. It’s worth it.

And it’s worth remembering how two days of happy madness fit into the bigger picture. The span of a single weekend, I’m happy to report, will not destroy you. It will not derail you. If anything, it might offer some rest from the other five days of the week — the days spent worrying, stressing, and steadfastly trying to ignore the number on your bathroom scale. (That number is useless, by the way. Junk it.)

This is not an invitation to go nuts. You don’t, I’m happy to report, need to binge on an entire box of pizza, and nor do you need to plop down on Saturday morning and stuff your face well through that same night.

You do need to relax.

You need to enjoy this weekend in simple, small ways, and remind yourself why you do what you do: so you can do this. You eat healthy and clean and light during the week, in other words, so that you can relax and enjoy and smile when you’re out with friends or family on the weekend and temptation sits on a silver platter in front of you.

This is why you work. This is why you’re trying to eat healthy, but you’re not on a diet. This, lastly, is why you can nab a small spoon (or three) of bread pudding and just smile when people immediately seize the opportunity to comment on what you’re eating.

“But that’s not Paleo, right?”

“What about your diet?”

Enjoy the indulgence. In the context of your life, a weekend barely registers as a small drop in the pond — but in the moment, there, with that spoon on your lips, the occasional indulgence can make all of your hard work so worthwhile.

Have a great weekend.

And What’s This About a Book?

I want you to go this link: http://www.mattmadeiro.com/happiness.html.

And then I want you to be in my next book.

The book, entitled Happiness Is, is meant to be a short, fun piece about the simple pleasures in life — 50 of them, in fact, complete with brief (and often goofy) descriptions. Rather than having 50 straight pages of blurbs, however, I thought I’d try and include illustrations of each pleasure.

This is where you come in! My own drawing skills are earth-shatteringly bad at best, so I had the wild idea to open it up to friends, readers, etc. and see if anyone has any interest in picking an item off the list and drawing it.

What’s in it for you?

A few things:

1. You’ll make me incredibly happy. A secret hope of mine is to turn this into a community art project of sorts.
2. Your name pops up in an ebook! Your name will accompany your illustration (alongside a link to your website if you have one), and you’ll also get to write a blurb about yourself to insert into a section at the end of the book. If you’re not already a subscriber, too, you’ll (of course!) get a free copy of the book to put on your digital bookshelf.
3. The knowledge that you saved the world from exposure to my artistic ‘skills.’ The planet thanks you.

So here’s that link again: http://www.mattmadeiro.com/happiness.html.

You know what to do. The goal is to have these illustrations (at least this first round) by Wednesday of next week, so act now if you’re interested! And thanks!