Live Every Day Like It's Your First

Baby grandmas, child play & Piera Gelardi on expanding reality

Self-portrait & portrait (c. 1995)

I came across a video the other day—a young woman describing years of illness and suffering, and the moment she hit a wall and thought, I can’t do this anymore. What changed, she said, was shifting that thought—one that kept her looking at “closed doors”—to something very different: I’ll figure it out.

It stayed with me, because I recognized the feeling immediately—that moment when something inside you quietly gives out.

Two years ago, when my leukemia returned for the third time, I felt something close to that same edge. I had to resume chemo—this time indefinitely—and prepare for the reality of a third transplant somewhere down the line. I felt defeated, almost paper-thin at the prospect of beginning again. For weeks, I could barely get out of bed. I couldn’t imagine how to keep going, let alone what “figuring it out” might even mean.

Some of you may have heard me talk about the advice I was given: live every day as if it’s your last. I understand the spirit of it, but in practice, it filled me with a kind of frantic pressure—an insistence that every moment be meaningful, every family dinner special. It began to feel like a kind of existential claustrophobia—no room for the ordinary. And respectfully, I came to believe it was terrible advice.

What I needed was something gentler—a way of being that didn’t demand so much of me.

Since then, I’ve been trying to live each day as if it is my first: to approach it with the curiosity, openness, and sense of wonder of a little kid. To leave room for small, unremarkable joys. Less urgency. More play. To wake up not asking, What do I need to accomplish today? but What is there to notice? What might surprise me? What feels even slightly enlivening?

It’s been a small shift, but a significant one—the kind that doesn’t change everything at once, but quietly reroutes your sense of what matters. When I’m able to step into the day with this spirit, I find myself less concerned with optimization, less obedient to the script I’d been following without quite realizing it. In its place: a greater willingness to follow the strange impulse, the small tug—things that don’t make sense on paper but spark a kind of private delight.

Which is why, when I was in Los Angeles for work a few weeks ago, I texted my friend Tee, who runs a small dog rescue, and asked if I could stop by between meetings. You know—just to visit. She said yes, and mentioned a fresh batch of puppies that had just arrived. Phew, I thought, a little disappointed, a little relieved. Fostering puppies isn’t really my thing, and so I was safe from the temptation to grow my weird little wolf pack.

And then, mid-visit, a call came in: a bonded pair of senior chihuahuas had just been dumped at the animal shelter and needed a foster. Tee handed me her phone to show me a photo. They weighed two pounds each and looked scared, and alarmingly cute. Possibly mother and daughter, definitely soulmates.

You already know what happened next.

Twenty-four hours later, I flew home with two new foster dogs—the “baby grandmas,” as we started calling them. I spent the plane ride drafting their adoption profiles, instinctively shaping them like personal ads:

Baby Grandma 1 (The Mother)

Italian widow energy.
A tiny black nose the size of a pea. Zero teeth.
Peaceful. Pure. Sweet. Chaste. Devout, possibly.
Has buried three husbands (emotionally).
Remembers the war (unclear which one).
Arthritic and unbothered.

Baby Grandma 2 (The Daughter)

A wildcard, with two walrus teeth (decorative).
Silly. A little flirty. No real plan.
Trembles unless held skin-to-skin—ideally in a bra, as ordained.
Flops onto her back and poses like a French girl.
Currently seeking a heated cat bed and intense emotional entanglement.
Easily overwhelmed by existence.

This little writing exercise felt both entirely unhinged and completely natural. Only later did I recognize the impulse as childhood muscle memory. At age eight, when we lived in Tunisia, I kept a journal of all the stray dogs on our block—naming them, writing their biographies, pasting their photos onto the page.

There’s a particular kind of logic to the things your eight-year-old self loved. They’re easy to dismiss as impractical, unnecessary, or beside the point. But the things that don’t make sense on paper are often the very things that make us feel most alive, that return us to ourselves.

Which brings me to today’s guest contributor, Piera Gelardi, whose work sits at this intersection of imagination, play, and possibility. In her new book, The Playful Way, she writes about shifting from a life driven by pressure and perfectionism to one shaped by curiosity, flexibility, and joy.

Her essay and prompt today offer a reminder that imagination is not frivolous—it’s generative. Sometimes, the way through isn’t to force ourselves to believe we can do the impossible. It’s to adjust our sightline, notice what comes into view, and step—however tentatively—through that opening.

Paolo Salvati, Figments of the Imagination

Prompt 378. If Just 3.5 Percent of Us Believe by Piera Gelardi

People be like “that’s not realistic” as if the entire universe is not a living miracle beyond our wildest imagination. —James McCrae

I was sitting in a bustling café in Union Square with my friend Sophia Li, a journalist and climate advocate who radiates optimism like she has sunshine flowing through her veins. We were talking about the state of the world (you know, light conversation for a Tuesday morning) and whether she thought playfulness had a role in solving big problems.

“Look, the scale of challenge we face is immense,” she said. “But if we keep being doom and gloom, saying it’s a ‘dumpster fire,’ we’ll get mired in that pessimistic belief and inaction. We have to remember that imagination actually makes us more human, more empathetic, better problem solvers. It lets us step into other people’s shoes. We think play is all lighthearted fun, but it actually opens roadblocks to help be more unified as a collective.”

I sighed and said, “It just seems so hard.”

Sophia’s eyes twinkled. “Let me tell you about the three-­point-five percent rule,” she said. She told me about Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth, who studied 323 civil resistance campaigns over the last century, including the Philippines’ Freedom Movement and the South African antiapartheid movement. Her discovery: it only takes the active and sustained participation of 3.5 percent of a population to create serious social change.

Think about that. Just 3.5 percent of people, dreaming up a different existence and acting on it. That’s all it takes to reshape the world.

Before any change happens in the real world, it has to happen in our minds. We have to dream about what could be before we can create it. That’s where most of us get stuck—­we’re so focused on what is that we forget to dream about what could be. We walk around with invisible boxes, built from our past experiences, our biases, our fears—­the voice that says, “That’ll never work,” or “Things have always been this way.”

These boxes excuse us from trying and risking disappointment or sounding “crazy.” But the boxes? They’re imaginary. We built them, which means we have the power to break them down and build a new existence beyond them.

The next time you notice yourself throttling what you believe is possible by trying to “be realistic,” remember that dreaming is a reality expander. Whether you’re doing dress rehearsals in your mind, escaping to imaginary clubs when your spirit needs a boost, or envisioning solutions that don’t yet exist, imagination allows us to go from passive acceptance of what is to the architects of what could be.

This is your prompt:

Start your morning with a small mental stretch using your coffee or tea ritual to prime your brain to search for possibility.

1. Sit with your morning beverage and take three easy breaths.

2. Look into your cup and imagine it’s a portal.

3. Visualize one of the following:
   —Yourself at a future date, achieving something you’re working toward

   —A childhood space that brought you joy or comfort

   —Having coffee with someone you miss or want to connect with

   —Having coffee with your past self—what do you want to tell yourself?

   —A place you’ve always wanted to see

4. Close your eyes and briefly imagine the scene in detail.

5. Open your eyes, return to the present, and take your first sip.

Now write about where your portal took you and what came up. Feel free to repeat every day this week.

I’d love to hear what this essay and prompt opened up for you—

Today’s Contributor—

Piera Luisa Gelardi is a creative entrepreneur, speaker, and artist passionate about bringing play into every room she enters. Her new book The Playful Way is a guidebook to finding more creativity, connection, and joy in everyday life by tapping into the power of play. Piera co-founded the influential media brand Refinery29 and its magical pop-up 29Rooms, earning recognition as one of Ad Age’s “50 Most Creative People” and Entrepreneur’s “50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs.” Through her new company NoomaLooma and her energetic keynotes, Piera helps people unlock their day-to-day creative superpowers.

My parents attic, where the Isolation Journals was born

Celebrating Six Years—

The Isolation Journals turned six on April 1—that’s six years of writing, noticing, searching, trying to make sense of our lives together. To celebrate, I curated a selection of greatest hits from our archive—newsletters, essays, interviews with extraordinary artists, creative workshops, daily journaling challenges, and more.

Six years of the Isolation Journals, in your words—

Thank you for creating this one-of-a-kind community and for changing my life forever. The Isolation Journals got me through the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic, helped me discover my voice, launched my personal writing journey, and connected me with friends I cherish. —Abby Alten Schwartz

Living within this “living, breathing” community for the past six years—where I can be seen, heard, and loved unconditionally, while I wade through the muck, joy, fear, curiosity, grief, unknown, and celebration of this life—sheds light into the darkest shadows of my mind, spirit, and soul. Thank you, dear Suleika, Carmen, Holly, for creating this safe haven for us all. My gratitude is beyond words. —Pat Taylor

Happiest of anniversaries to an amazing community! Suleika, Carmen, Holly—may you bask in all the beauty and connection you have generated for so many. Thank you for leaping when the world was uncertain, for trusting the community with your words and thoughts, and for sharing so many incredibly inspiring people— lifting each person up. So much love for you all & this community! —Rhonda Willers

Six years in, the community that you have built has often felt like a lifeline—sometimes a cozy den, and always a place of vulnerability, discovery, and inclusion. I have loved every prompt and 30-day project. You created this without knowing what it would become, but with an open heart, curiosity, and an intuitive sense that many of us yearned for this even if we couldn’t name it. My gratitude to this extraordinary trio and the talented friends they have shared with us. —Amy Harbison