Whether you call it kindness or you use a ten-cent-word like altruism, the world needs a lot more of it right now and the Action for Happiness calendar for August is a great place to start.
As always, the calendar is full of small practices that almost anyone could try but if you don’t feel up to the practice of the day, it’s totally cool to be kind in a whole different way. I’m sure you have a huge repertoire of kind actions you can take at any time.
In fact, even though this calendar is about being kind to others, it’s also a swell idea to practice being kinder to ourselves – these Self-Compassion Practices from Dr. Kristin Neff are a good place to start.
And the small actions are the most important part.
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in waiting to do a big project or to solve a big problem but to not actually be able to get started.
Doing a small thing right now is way better than developing a big thing that never actually gets done.
So, as you give these small actions a whirl, please don’t worry that you aren’t doing enough right now. It’s ok to take the small steps now and let them build over time.
Here’s the full calendar for this month and today’s action is pretty straightforward, “Ask someone how they feel and really listen to their reply.”
Good luck out there, folks!
An image of a calendar of tips for Altruistic August 2026 that features small cartoon drawings of altruistic along the bottom edge. (for example, someone is putting coins in a tin, someone else is offering noodles to a friend, someone else is picking up garbage. Each block of the calendar features an action for that day and the background of each block is either dark or light blue or dark or light green.
A video from the Action for Happiness YouTube channel entitled, “Never underestimate the power of small acts of kindness.” The still image features Vanessa King, a middle-aged woman with medium blonde hair cut in a bob with a bang. She is wearing a white top with a series of red bead necklaces looped around her neck. Text to the right of the image reads, “Kindness Matters” in red and “3 tops tips with Vanessa King” in yellow.
One way or another, I’ve been heading into Algonquin for 20 years with a variety of friends, family, lovers and dogs. To say it is a sacred and integral part of my life is to understate what it means. The four years I’ve been away from it have been achy (not just because of the lack of Park, there’s been plenty to ache my heart). Yet, every summer that ended without me spending time in a tent on a lake with a canoe parked under a tree and a loon calling just around the corner, was another piece of grief. So this summer, as I reorganized my life, again, after so many losses, again, I messaged Sam and Sarah to see if they would have me on their trip with them.
In part, my failure to plan trips was due to my increasing trepidation about my body. Pandemic, menopause, auto-immune conditions all conspired to rob me of confidence that I could still endure and do this thing. So going with people who never gave it up, who knew they could adapt themselves, was heartening. I was very surprised at what I found out about my capacity.
First of all, the things that hurt while I’m not on a trip barely hurt while I was on the trip. Other things hurt of course, but I was so happy to feel tiredness in my shoulders and quads, knowing it was because I was moving, rather than the vague ache of. . .pick the poison. . .sedentariness, grief, age, decline, despair. . .it all adds up. In fact, there were ways I was stronger somehow. I have never given up yoga and Pilates and always focused on balance. I have this notion that I am no longer agile and that my core isn’t what it used to be but I was wrong. I think the last number of years I have spent in meditative stillness have conditioned something I never had before that practice became a huge part of my life. There is a core conditioning and balance along with a softness and awareness that means my body knows where it is and what it is doing. It knows what hurts in the way of “discomfort” and what hurts in the way of “don’t do that”. Discomfort is far more prevalent and discomfort I can handle.
I can feel that I’m at another crossroad, I could just stop pushing and drift to a customary decline or I could keep brushing up against my limits and seeing what beauty I can find. The verdant beauty of the earth expressed in Algonquin park is worth pushing for. I was so happy and confident about how this trip went that I booked more vacation and decided to bring friend of the Blog, Kim, on the trip she’s been pestering me for since we met. We will report back on Older Women In The Park, Susan and Kim edition, after Labour Day!
Sam
Like Susan, I love love love canoe camping. There’s something very special about it and no other sort of holiday scractches the same itch.
It’s effort and natural beauty, yes. It’s also no phones and hammock naps. I love swimming after a hard paddle. I love eating food that’s been cooked over the samp stove. I love basking on rocks. And I know it’s a minority view, but I love sleeping in tents.
I go at least once every summer, sometimes more. This summer this was our first trip but we have two more planned.
It’s the vacation that packs the most bang for buck in terms of rest and relaxation and the feeling of really getting away. Three or four days in the woods isn’t that much time, but it feels like a real holiday.
I also love that I’m still learning new things. This trip, for the first time, I carried my pack and my canoe. I learned that in some ways that’s easier. Yes, it’s a lot more weight but it felt better on my shoulders.
It was lovely to get out there again with Susan since that’s really how our friendship began, on a canoe trip in the woods.
She had the uncomfortable middle spot in our canoe but this inspired us to get a third removable seat.
Sarah
Seems like this was a bit of a different trip for everyone this year. Susan returning after a hiatus, and Sam growing in strength and confidence a few years out from knee surgery.
For me, the biggest hiccup this year wasn’t work, and it wasn’t the dramatic car part failure that meant switching cars and shaving a day off our trip. I’m currently dealing with a frozen left shoulder – not usually hugely painful but the restricted range of motion means I can’t reach up to hold the gunwales when the canoe is on my shoulders. This means that for the first time since we’ve been tripping, I would need to rely entirely on my companions to portage the canoe.
Fortunately, Susan and Sam were both more than up for the challenge and were more than capable at carrying and manoeuvring Sam’s unwieldy (when it’s not in the water) 17’ canoe. For someone who’s used to being self-reliant in the backcountry, it was a wonderful experience to be able to literally share the load this trip.
How many posts? More than 30 posts this month, through a run of heat and wildfire smoke that scrambled a lot of our workout plans — proof that showing up looks different every summer.
Who blogged? Sam, Diane, Christine, Nat, Catherine, Mina, Tracy, Martha, Elan, and guest blogger Chloë.
Recovery and what the body actually needs. A strong thread this month was on healing slower — and more honestly — than planned. Diane’s cardiac-rehab arc continued in Recovery is Weird, where her Garmin body battery finally climbed out of the “depleted” zone even as her intensity minutes stayed baffling. Mina’s Deny Pain, Heal Faster; if only … looked back at a shoulder injury that turned out to be several fractures and torn tissue, and wondered whether not knowing the full diagnosis for a month actually helped her heal with less fear and guarding. Nat worked through the final stage of a back injury in Nat, spinal movement and the Jefferson curl, learning to trust movements she’d been avoiding out of old caution. And Tracy’s C25K is taking longer than 9 weeks and that’s okay traced how a running program stalled out after she lost her mother, and how she’s found her way back to it.
Guest voices on bodies and belief. Chloë’s guest post What I thought my body was for was a standout: a lifelong “mind person” who took up jiu-jitsu in her forties and discovered a forty-year-old assumption about her own physical limits was never actually true — just an old, unquestioned story.
Heat, smoke, and summer plans going sideways. Climate kept elbowing its way into the blog’s usual summer rhythms. Sam’s summer movement plans go awry catalogued a cascade of cancelled rides, smoky air quality, a shuttered pool, and a too-hot dog walk, while Nat’s Summer’s in full swing and Nat couldn’t be happier found the bright side of an early-morning, heat-dodging routine of walking, biking, and lane swims. Sam and her crew still managed a four-day canoe camping trip into Algonquin (“Type 1.5 fun,” by consensus), and Catherine spent two weeks travelling and noticing the small sensory pleasures of summer — cold rivers, gravel underfoot, one very memorable watermelon slushie — in Mid-summer: a time for ordinary movement and extraordinary sensory experience.
Charity miles for good causes. Nat rode the MS Bike Tour (Today’s the day!), a weekend that’s become a fixture in her relationship with Michel. Diane paid forward her open-water swimming in Sometimes Good Things Grow, serving as a swim angel at Bring on the Bay for the fourth year running. And Sam wrapped the month gearing up for the Great Cycle Challenge in support of SickKids, after laying out her whole summer and fall of charity riding in Sam’s August Charity Riding.
Feminism, sport, and language in the news. Martha’s Blowing the Whistle on Gender at the World Cup celebrated the six women officiating the men’s tournament this year — a record, even if still a small fraction of FIFA’s roster. Diane’s My FIFA Protest Has Turned into Something Pretty Great turned frustration with lopsided World Cup coverage into a new love of the Northern Super League. And Martha’s Incompetent, blighted, senile took on the quietly damning language medicine uses for women’s bodies — incompetent cervix, senile vagina — and argued for language that doesn’t blame the patient for the problem.
Sam’s dean life meets the blog. In Is Looking at Art Really the New Running?, Sam brought her day job as Dean of Arts at Guelph into conversation with the blog, digging into the research behind claims that gallery visits can be as good for you as a run — and landing on cautious enthusiasm for treating art as part of a whole-life approach to health.
Trackers, streaks, and small daily wins. Elan reflected on five years of wearing an Oura ring in A Fitbit for My Finger, Five Years On, noting how her relationship to the data has quietly simplified over time. Sam kept her Zwift streak alive through the heat in Sam’s Zwift streak abides!, and the team traded reflections on their most valuable personal habits — sleep, meal planning, morning movement — in The bloggers and our best habits.
Checking in as a team. July 2 brought Happy Halfway Day!, the bloggers’ traditional midyear check-in on their words of the year, and Elan closed out the month interviewing Sam about her long-running “3 good things” practice in Positive is Practice, digging into negativity bias and what it means to notice the good on purpose.
Month-in-review posts are assembled by Claude with prompts from Sam and edited by Sam. If you spot any errors, let us know.
I’m a big fan of Danny MacAskill, a Scottish cyclist whose feats on his trials bikes confirm the unlikely hypothesis that bikes can perform on land, sea and air. His videos leave me breathless and dumbfounded, but also admiring of his planning, effort, and honesty about how hard it is to know the magnitude of the obstacles you’re facing, and then face them anyway.
Then in 2024, as the political atmosphere in the US became as scary as the previous pandemic one, I wrote about how Danny shows us how to take what comes: slowly when necessary, using acquired skills, trusting that your body has some knowledge that will help you, and using body english to manage unexpected twists and turns. How to make 2024 less scary, or how to move forward anyway
Now it’s 2026, and aspects of my life feel both scary and appalling, in macro and micro views. The US government is falling apart and taking too many people with it. My mother is falling apart and I’m trying to figure out how to respond. Details of life management have become harder, for macro and micro reasons.
I’m about to go on my first coffee ride in a while with my friend Janet, who’s meeting me in Arlington Center to cycle up the bike path to Lexington. I’ve done this ride dozens of times, and am looking forward to easy chat, easy pedaling, and yummy ice coffee. I remember how to do this, and am managing my anxiety with that knowledge along with the reward at the end– hanging with a friend, drinking coffee.
And I can take comfort in the fact that no part of my ride will go over water and require the skills you see practiced below by Danny MacAskill in his newest video– riding over water! I’ll just let you watch, heart in mouth, hoping against hope he doesn’t end up in the drink… If you want to read an interview with him about this course, check it out here.
I haven’t figured out the full plan yet, but I’m starting strong: the first holiday Monday with Sarah, then Tuesday morning before work with Abby, my Tour de Guelph Gryphons teammate. Neither ride is huge on its own — but they add up fast, and that’s the idea.
Cancer is the leading disease-related killer of Canadian kids. Over 1,700 are diagnosed every year. Kids should be living life, not fighting for it.
Click here to donate — every dollar supports SickKids Foundation’s work on care, treatment, and finding a cure.
Here’s my weekday commuting bike and my smile yesterday at the cool, clear summer air.
I interviewed Sam about her regular habit of sharing “3 good things” from her days on her personal social media feed.
EP: You often post “3 good things” on your personal socials along with photos. How long have you been doing this, and has your reason for still doing it changed since you started?
SB: I started six years ago in November. November is gratitude month, and it’s also my least favourite month of the year, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to look around and find things to be grateful for.
I’m not sure exactly when I started doing it year-round, maybe two or three years ago? I liked it so much I didn’t want to stop when November was over.
Why do I keep it up? I like the way it makes me feel. But also, and I notice this more these days, the practice itself trains me to start looking around for good things.
EP: This tracks with something I heard on a recent podcast about negativity bias. We’re wired to overfocus on the bad (to the point where we overlook the good), but intentionally practising the positive can help us rebalance. The researcher called it gain-framing, seeing experiences through a positive lens or treating setbacks as opportunities to learn. Does that match your practice?
SB: Yes, that definitely matches my experience. I do a bit of only good things and a bit of reframing. I’ve got a close family member in the hospital. Not good. But good that they’re getting the excellent medical care they need.
A woman in glasses looks through her fingers Ina square frame shape
I also share bad news. I’m one of those academics, for example, who posts about rejections. It’s not just good news. Junior scholars need to see that rejection is part of the process. I also share when I stop doing things, so it doesn’t always look like I’m doing more new things without stopping others.
EP: The podcast researcher talked about the value of sharing positive experiences with others, which reinforce them and connect us to others through that sharing. Do you think about how others receive your posts? How do you feel sharing them?
SB: I do worry sometimes that people think it’s all good things all the time, but there’s a lot of bad at work that I can’t share on social media for a whole host of reasons. Ditto bad personal news, which often involves other people, and sometimes it’s their story to tell, not mine. Sometimes I find it hard to get the valence right.
EP: It sounds like you are aware of thr bad, but it’s not always shareable. So that’s another reason why you just choose to focus on the good. And maybe that you don’t want the terrible to stop your from seeing the good?
SB: I find that seeing the good helps me understand what we’re struggling for, why it all matters. The world is a beautiful place.
We were canoe camping this past weekend and I loved the light on the water, the sounds of the birds, watching a hummingbird on the flowers, swimming with loons, basking on warm rocks after swimming in a cold lake, the taste of hot tea and cookies, swaying in a hammock and napping. So many good things.
EP: How would you recommend that others try out sharing “3 good things,” and what to do on the days when thry feel negativity bias creeping in?
SB: To be honest, I’ve skipped 3 or 4 days over the years where things were too bleak to do it. I think that’s okay. That’s life.
I keep a Google doc on my phone, called Three Good Things, for myself. But I also share on social media for the habit and the accountability. For a time I thought about starting a blog just focused on tracking workouts and sharing good things. You could do that too.
Listen to “Stepping Out of the Shadows” from Hidden Brain, hosted by Shankar Vedantam, with psychologist Alison Ledgerwood (University of California Davis).,who explores negativity bias, the deeply human tendency to hold on to what went wrong and overlook what went right. In the episode, Ledgerwood unpacks why our minds are drawn to losses and threats, and what can be done to rebalance our attention.
At least that’s what Susan, Sarah, and I decided on day 3 of our 4-day canoe trip into Algonquin Park after a particularly long, buggy portage.
A younger guy travelling with young kids looked at us carrying the canoe and hauling backpacks and paddles and PFDs and asked us if we were having type 1 or type 2 fun.
Sarah replied, We’re getting old. It’s all type 2 fun for us.
But then Susan and I discussed it and decided it averages out to 1.5 fun.
You know the distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 fun?
“First, let’s break down the differences. “Type 1” fun is pure, uncomplicated enjoyment in the moment. Think eating ice cream, watching a movie, or lounging on a beach. It’s casual, low-effort, and comes with an immediate reward.
Type 2” fun shifts the dynamic. It’s an activity that requires effort—and maybe even a little discomfort—in the moment. Think backpacking deep in the woods, downhill mountain biking, or learning a physically and mentally demanding new skill. Sure, you might feel a little miserable while you’re in the thick of it, but once you’ve accomplished it, the experience can feel downright glorious.”
Here’s our breakdown:
What’s Type 2 fun? Portages! Paddling into the wind! Hanging the food so bears won’t get it!
What’s Type 1 fun? Swimming, basking on rocks, paddling on a flat lake, naps in hammocks, eating any food cooked over the camp stove, coffee in the morning…
Here’s some photos from our trip:
Magnetawan to Hambone to Ralph Bice to Little Trout and back
When I started The Conqueror 2026 challenge in January, I set myself a goal of 730 kms of deliberate exercise* for the year.
For those of you playing along at home, that would be the equivalent of 2 km per day, every day.
Why ‘the equivalent’?
Because I don’t actually care all that much about walking that specific distance.
What I care about is increasing my daily exercise/activity levels and the Conqueror challenge lets me measure everything in terms of distance so all of my fitness activities are adding up to the same thing. *
If that sentence made you say, “Wait, what?”, please allow me to clarify.
The distance was pretty arbitrary in the first place – I picked it to represent the approximate amount of activity I figured I could do most days.
I don’t care specifically about walking that distance, I care about doing that much activity.
The app lets me input other activities – like calisthenics, yard work, or dancing – into the tracker and tells me the walking distance that is equivalent to that activity.
Since my ADHD self tends to struggle with tracking/measuring progress, especially if that tracking is overly detailed or fine-grained, having everything translated to distance is really helpful. AND having everything rolled into one metric reminds me that all of the different types of exercise I do are all part of the same goal – feeling better and moving more easily.
But even though the tracker is useful and has helped me to be way more consistent than I would otherwise be, I am currently behind on my challenge.
a screen cap of my challenge homepage that shows two gray rectangles in the centre the top rectangle says ‘goal distance 730.0 km’ and the bottom rectangle says ‘Reason – to challenge myself to move a lot each day.’ behind the rectangles are two images that will be on the eventual medal I will receive. In the upper right corner is the long neck of a dragon outlines of clouds behind it. The dragon is gold and the cloud outlines summer gold, and some are bronze. In the bottom left corner is a grey silhouette of a howling wolf sitting on an outline of a rock and there are outlined clouds behind it. At the bottom of the image is a circular logo that says ‘Conquer 2026’. And shows two trackers. The top one in gray and black indicates that I have travelled 42% of the distance. I need to travel this year. The bottom one indicates that 57% of the year has passed. Underneath both of those is a sentence that reads 103.7 km behind your planned pace.
Luckily, I’m not fazed by this in the least.
There were definitely times in the past when I would have ditched the challenge by this point because of the focused effort it will take to close the gap between my current position and the ideal position for this point in the year.
But this current version of myself is looking at that gap and thinking. “I can totally close that!”
And guess what?
I’m right!
It may take me until the end of September but I am 100% confident that I will catch up, keep going, and earn a 2026 Conqueror challenge medal.
I’ll let you know how things are going at the end of August.
*And ‘deliberate exercise’ means additional movement that I have chosen to do – i.e. I am not measuring steps that are part of my daily activities.
**Besides fitness, of course, but the idea of being ‘fitter’ or having a good ‘fitness level’ is not even remotely tangible.
