Before I retired, I started creating quarter-end reports gathering the moments that actually mattered to me from the past three months. As a true maximalist, I love formally keeping track of my best sunrises, hikes, and meals.

Much more fundamentally, writing these Quarterly Appreciations always leaves me stunned at how very, very good my life is. The world is not kind. But somehow the world—and the people in it—are often unreasonably kind to me.

It wasn’t always that way. As a child and young adult, I was often deeply sad. Through my mid-30s or so, I would spend entire weekends watching marathons of junk television because I didn’t have it in me to do more. Somewhere along the way, all of that changed.

Part of my aim in this blog is to understand and articulate what changed. These Appreciations—and the earlier, less deliberate forms of noticing that came before them, are part of the change. It seems that perhaps attention is itself the engine of joy, and these Appreciations are a formal way to feed that engine.

And, part of my aim is to a express something that might need to be said more often: my life has gotten profoundly better, richer, and more dynamic as I’ve aged. In my 40s, I’m less angry, more generous, and far more interesting than I ever was in my 20s or 30s. And it seems to me that this is because of, and not despite, the longer time I’ve had to sort it all out.

My Quarterly Appreciations are below. Feel very free to add your own in the comments, or on the Community Appreciations page of my companion blog, Not Your Fiat Life.