Holding All Three

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

Thanks once again for making room for a little optimism inside your days.

Most of us are carrying more than one feeling at any given moment.

We just don't always say so out loud.

This week we're exploring what it means to feel grief, gratitude and excitement all at the same time.

Why they can show up together, and why we're not meant to feel them in a certain order or sort them into a queue.

This weekend marks two years since I lost my Mum, and with Father's Day passing by recently, I've been living this one rather than just writing about it.

We also climb the Peruvian Andes with the extraordinary ‘Tino’ Aucca Chutas, find an antidote to the relentlessness of daily headlines, and discuss why our sad days are part of what makes the bright ones shine.

Here's to a week with plenty of room for all of the above.

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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Most mornings of most days, I catch a glimpse of the clock at 11:11.

And at night too, if I'm still up and about.

Something within me ensures I look up at exactly that minute.

It started when I was about ten or eleven years old.

When my Dad and I discovered that we both had this same habit of noticing 11:11 specifically.

So we made a pact.

Whenever either of us caught it, we'd use the moment to stop and think of each other.

Over the years, we’d often send a quick message or reminder whenever it was 11:11, regardless of the time zone differences.

He's been gone 7 years now.

But the 11:11 phenomenon has never left.

These days when I catch it, everything arrives at once.

A wave of grief.

Along with a wave of gratitude as the memories come flooding back.

But there’s also a small, private smile, knowing I get to do this on most days for the rest of my life.

All of that happens in the space of a single minute.

Most of us are carrying more than one feeling at any given time.

I know I am.

We just don't always say so out loud.

Grief for what we've lost, gratitude for what remains and excitement for what's coming next.

There’s the people we've lost and still ache for at times.

There's everything we have right now that we never want to take for granted.

And there's the anticipation of what's to come that we look forward to.

Grief, gratitude and excitement, all sharing the same heart at the same time.

For the longest time I'd assumed that these feelings took turns.

That first you grieved a loss, then slowly healed, and one day woke up clear-eyed and ready to be excited about life again.

Life hasn't worked that way for me.

Not even close.

More often than not, all three turn up at once.

Sometimes in the same moment.

They sit together, side by side.

More recently, I've started to believe that holding all three together is a skill worth building.

Just last month, on Father's Day, I felt all three quite sharply.

In Canada, Father's Day falls in June, a different date than back home in Australia where it's celebrated in September.

One of the small, funny side effects of moving your life to the other side of the world.

Since losing my Dad unexpectedly, Father's Day now carries a weight it never used to.

There's the grief, which is all too subtle and familiar, for the man who shaped so much of how I see the world but is no longer here to share it.

But then there's gratitude sitting right there beside it.

I get to be a father every day myself, to two kids that mean everything to me.

One thing I'll never take for granted, not for a second.

I used to place grief and gratitude in separate rooms, as if feeling one meant betraying the other.

Now I know better.

They're companions, and on a day like Father's Day, they walk hand in hand.

And then there's the part that catches me off guard because it feels a bit naughty.

Excitement.

It genuinely pains me that my parents will never see my kids grow up.

That they won't have the relationship with them I'd hoped they would.

That ache is real, one that won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

And yet I still can't wait for what's ahead.

I get to watch them grow, cheer them on, and hand down all the stories, including the great ones about their grandfather.

I get to be their Dad.

That's what Father's Day feels like now.

All of it flowing at the same time.

Because I've stopped trying to force the feelings apart and started letting them blend together.

That allows me to feel the full spectrum of what fatherhood means to me.

We often hear grief referred to as something that fades.

Time heals, people say, as if the wound slowly closes until you can no longer see the scar.

A grief counsellor named Lois Tonkin tabled a different perspective, and it's stayed with me since reading it.

She'd also assumed that grief shrinks over the years.

Smaller and smaller, until, eventually, it takes up little room.

But then she listened to a grieving mother, and found something else.

The grief didn't shrink at all.

It stayed exactly the same size.

What changed, though, was the life around it.

People grew.

They had new experiences, met new people, found new reasons to laugh.

Their lives expanded outward until the grief, still whole, still the same, took up a smaller share of a much bigger whole.

I find that oddly comforting.

It means we're not failing when the ache returns years later, sharp as ever, on a birthday or when a certain song or moment leaves you awash with memories.

The grief was always going to stay that size.

Our job was never to shrink it.

It was to build a life big enough to hold it.

You don't ache like that over something that didn't matter.

Because the size of your grief is really just a measure of how much you loved someone.

Gratitude has a unique problem.

Because the good things in our lives are often the easiest to stop noticing.

Like the roof over your head or the person asleep beside you.

The good stuff tends to become background noise fast, too fast.

We file it under normal and stop noticing it at all.

Psychologists have a clever way of jolting us back awake though.

In 2008, a team led by Minkyung Koo ran a study they named after the old Christmas film ‘It's a Wonderful Life.’

You know, the one where George Bailey gets the chance to witness what the world would look like had he never been born.

They asked people to write about how a good thing in their life, like meeting their partner, might never have happened.

The chance encounter that almost didn't happen or the decision that could’ve gone a different way.

Those who imagined the absence of that good thing?

Felt noticeably more grateful and more positive than those who simply described it.

It's a bit backwards when you think about it.

You feel more grateful picturing what you'd miss than you do focusing on what you've got.

It's the same muscle grief leverages, only pointed in a more hopeful direction.

Grief shows you the worth of something after it's gone.

Gratitude is the chance to see that worth while it's still present.

Still here, still yours to hold.

And then there's the part of us that leans forward.

An instinct I've always seen as a good thing and one that has served me well.

The trip that's booked that you're yet to take.

Dinner with a friend you only see every few months.

Even the version of your life that has yet to arrive, but you know is on its way.

Excitement is often underestimated, dismissed as a simple emotion associated with kids as they eagerly anticipate Christmas.

But don’t sell it short.

Anticipation does real work for us and more than earns its keep.

Fred Bryant, the psychologist often called the father of savouring research, found that we get to enjoy each good experience three separate times.

Once when we look forward to it.

Once while it's happening.

And once when we look back on it.

Anticipation, that first savour, is freely available to all of us and massively underused.

Sometimes, the pleasure of looking forward is greater than the event itself.

Because hope and anticipation have no traffic, no rain, no real hiccups to speak of.

This starts to matter more as your years stack up.

Loss can falsely convince you that the best chapters are behind you, and that what's ahead is mostly managing your decline.

Anticipation says otherwise.

It insists there are still first times coming.

That there’s still plenty of things worth counting down to.

And as a result, we don't have to choose between honouring what's gone and looking forward to what's next.

We can absolutely do both.

Take away any one of the three and suddenly something feels wrong.

Grief without gratitude curdles into bitterness.

You can spend years so fixed on what was taken that you never notice what's still in your hands.

Gratitude without grief becomes a form of denial.

A brittle form of positivity that skates right over the hard stuff, and won't allow you to feel the weight of anything.

And excitement without either becomes restlessness.

Where you're forever chasing the next thing because the present never feels like enough.

Held together, though, all three steady each other.

Grief keeps you honest about what mattered.

Gratitude pulls your attention back to what's in front of you.

And the pull of tomorrow stops the other two from becoming a museum you’re now forced to live inside.

One looks back, one looks around, one looks ahead.

Between them, they cover the whole of our life.

A life full of feeling.

One big enough to house the joy, and the ache, and the anticipation.

All of it.

Here are a few simple things that have helped me in recent years:

When grief surfaces, let it: Resist the urge to immediately reframe it into a tidy lesson and store it away. Its arrival is proof that something mattered, and that's allowed to hurt.

Try the George Bailey trick: Pick one good thing in your life and spend thirty seconds imagining it had never happened. Then come back to the fact that it did. It's a fast way to make the familiar feel like a gift again.

Put something on the calendar: It doesn't have to be big. A walk on the weekend, dinner with a great friend, a trip that's still months away. Give your mind something to look forward to. This works.

And when all three show up at once, as they will, don't try to sort them into a queue.

Let them sit together because they aren't competing.

It’s just what it feels like to care deeply about your life.

I don't feel the goal here is balancing them perfectly.

Some seasons are mostly grief while others are laced with anticipation.

The balance is in being willing to feel whichever one is asking for your attention at the time, without slamming the door on the other two.

Something I've noticed is that the people I admire most aren't the ones who've avoided loss or pushed their feelings aside.

They're the ones who can acknowledge a sad anniversary and a hopeful plan in the same moment and be honest about both.

Those who can miss someone terribly and still get genuinely excited about their plans this Friday.

That, to me, is about as close to fully alive as it gets.

Not numb, nor pretending everything's fine.

Just letting yourself feel what's gone, what's here, and what's still coming.

The losses don't become smaller with time.

Your life just grows around them, until there's room to hold everything at once.

I reckon that's the best any of us can hope for.

When looking for a video to sit alongside this, I skipped over the polished TED talks because I wanted a real person feeling things out loud. This short Andrew Garfield clip is exactly that. While talking with Stephen Colbert about losing his mum, he swings from laughing to holding back tears and back again in under a minute:

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High in the Peruvian Andes, before the sun has cleared the peaks, someone lifts up a conch shell and blows.

A few seconds later, drums answer the call.

Then, hundreds of people start to climb.

They move along steep trails higher than 4,000 metres, where the air is thin enough to make your head swim, carrying bundles of seedlings on their backs.

Some are even carrying their children at the same time.

By the end of the day they’ll have planted tens of thousands of native trees.

Once, in a single day, they managed more than 57,000.

They call it Queuña Raymi, the Festival of the Trees.

The man who dreamed it up is a remarkable Quechua biologist named Constantino Aucca Chutas.

Everyone calls him Tino.

In 2007, my girlfriend and I spent a few months travelling through South and Central America, spending more time in Peru than anywhere else.

Beyond Lima and Cusco, we walked the full four-day Inca Trail, sleeping under the stars, our legs wrecked, until on the final morning we came through the Sun Gate and watched Machu Picchu rise out of the mist below us.

That was the morning I asked her to marry me.

And the rest is history.

So when reading about Tino planting forests in the mountains above the Sacred Valley, along the same trails I once walked it hit home in a way I didn't expect.

Given how important the place has become to us.

Oh, and if you ever have the chance, I cannot recommend visiting Machu Picchu enough.

Anyway, back to Tino 😀

Tino's path began more than thirty years ago, as a biology student doing fieldwork around Cusco.

The slopes he loved were being stripped bare by fire, illegal logging and spreading farms.

He was entrusted with a responsibility by his Quechua farmer grandparents, a responsibility he embraced wholeheartedly and has never let go.

“Your name is Aucca, it means warrior," they told him.

"Please try to do something for us farmers."

He took it literally.

In 2000 he founded a conservation group, ECOAN, and has since planted more than three million trees across Peru.

3 million!

In 2018 he launched an even bigger effort, Acción Andina, carrying his model into five neighbouring countries, with a goal of protecting what survives and restoring what's been lost.

A million hectares in all.

In 2022 the United Nations named him a Champion of the Earth, its highest environmental honour.

Not bad for a man whose entire strategy was borrowed from his ancestors.

The trees Tino plants are known as queuña, or Polylepis, and they are unlike any forest on earth.

They grow higher up in the mountains than any trees on Earth, up to 5,000 metres above sea level, clinging to cold, steep ground where nothing else will grow.

Their trunks are gnarled and wrapped in papery, reddish bark, and their thick moss works like a sponge.

They pull water out of the passing clouds, hold on to it, and then release it slowly into the streams below.

That water feeds the farms, the animals and the towns further down the mountain.

In a region where glaciers are receding, these modest trees are ensuring a continuous water supply.

Which is what makes their loss so frightening.

The Andes were once blanketed in Polylepis.

Only around 500,000 hectares remain, chipped away over decades for firewood, grazing, mining and roads.

Tino himself, has always been honest about the odds he faces.

Tino found his method from within his own heritage.

The old Inca world ran on two ideas.

Ayni, which means "today for me, tomorrow for you."

And Minka, which is “everyone working together for the common good.”

Nobody is paid a wage to plant these trees on festival day.

They plant for one another, the way their families have farmed these mountains for centuries.

It costs almost nothing, and it endures, because the forest belongs to the people who grew it.

In return for that work, the communities receive more than a forest.

Tino's team helps them secure legal title to their land, shielding it from the timber and mining companies, and brings doctors, dentists, solar panels and cleaner-burning stoves to the villages.

The trees are simply where their partnership begins.

Reach back before you reach forward: Tino's breakthrough was an idea that was a thousand years old. Sometimes the fix for a modern problem is already sitting in your own history, and still works after all this time.

Make the work a celebration: People will climb a mountain for a day of music, food and belonging but they won't do it for a chore. Whatever you're trying to sustain lasts longer when there’s a sprinkle of joy in it.

You don't have to win outright: Tino can't stop every chainsaw, and he knows it. He just plants faster than the saws can cut, tipping the balance a little further toward the good.

When I was in Peru, the thing that moved me most, was the people.

The remarkable warmth of the people.

Not the ruins or the scenery, as breathtaking as they were.

The ever present, uncomplaining work ethic of families living hard lives at altitude, and the way they held on to what mattered without any fuss.

Tino has taken that same spirit and aimed it at the mountainside.

He didn't hold back and wait for his government or a grand budget to come his way.

He gave the local people a reason to believe their efforts would outlive them.

Because they will.

The trees he's planting now will outlive him, and some of them will outlive his grandchildren.

People like Tino deserve to be celebrated, even if they prefer not to be.

Because they stare directly at a problem and choose to do something useful about it.

There's a line of his that I read that’s impossible to forget.

He says the peoples of the Andes have come together only a handful of times in their whole history, and always for something momentous.

Then he asks what could possibly unite them again:

His answer was to protect a little tree.

If you'd like to meet Tino in his own words, this short UNEP film follows him into the mountains he's spent thirty years replanting:

I'll be upfront about something, I'm rarely on Instagram.

I don't really scroll it, I rarely post, and I can go weeks without opening the app at all.

The Happy Broadcast is one of the few accounts that draws me back.

If you switch on the news tonight, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world is coming apart at the seams.

I do need to be careful here, because the things that are happening are genuine.

But what we're handed is a very narrow slice of everything that’s going on out there, repeated until it starts to feel like the whole picture.

And it isn't.

There's a great deal of good happening in the world.

Far more than most of us hear about, and The Happy Broadcast has made a job out of pointing these things out.

It's the work of Mauro Gatti, an Italian illustrator and Emmy-winning creative director who's been living in the US for years now.

He started it back in 2018 for a reason I suspect many of us would recognise.

He'd moved to America, found himself waking up to a wall of awful headlines every morning, and noticed his own anxiety climbing as a result.

Gatti was diagnosed with Asperger's as a child and has lived with social anxiety his whole life, so the daily news cycle wasn't doing him any favours.

Instead of just switching it off, he went looking for the good news, and when he couldn't find the version he wanted?

He decided to make it himself.

That was eight years ago now, and he hasn't stopped since.

Every story he posts is real and properly sourced, with a link back to the original reporting, and he redraws each one as a bright, funny, hand-drawn card. He calls it anxiety-free news, which is about the best description you could ask for.

The illustrations are what pull you in, but the thinking underneath them is what won me over.

Gatti has been deliberate about avoiding what he calls the quick shot of dopamine. He had no interest in building another feed full of cute animal clips, because the things keeping him awake at night were bigger than that. Climate, politics, health, animal welfare, and no amount of puppy videos was ever going to touch any of it.

So that's what he covers instead. Genuine progress on the problems that actually worry us. A country hitting a renewable energy milestone, a species pulled back from the brink, a medical breakthrough, or a piece of legislation that quietly makes thousands of lives better.

It's proper journalism, aimed squarely at the half of the story that usually gets left on the cutting room floor.

And because it arrives as a cheerful cartoon rather than a wall of grim text, you come away feeling better than when you started, which seems a fairly reasonable thing to want from a news source.

A few ways to get something out of this one:

Follow it wherever you already scroll: The whole idea is to put something better into the feed you open without thinking. He's on Instagram, Threads, Facebook and X, so take your pick of whichever one has its hooks in you.

Click through to the sources: Every post links out to the original reporting, and following through is what turns a nice cartoon into something you actually know.

Treat it as a corrective rather than a replacement: Stay informed and read the hard stuff. Just don't let it be the only thing you read.

Pass one on when it lands: Good news travels nowhere near as fast as the other kind, and that's a habit worth trying to reverse.

You may remember I recommended Jamil Zaki's book Hope for Cynics a while back, and one of his findings has been on my mind since.

Cynicism isn't really a personality trait, so much as a shortage of good evidence.

We're wired to watch for threats, and the modern news cycle has become remarkably good at feeding that instinct.

Nobody ever got around to building the other half of the machine, because there's no survival advantage in knowing that things are slowly getting better.

That's what Gatti has now been doing for years, and he's now doing it for more than 800,000 people.

He’s not trying to convince anyone that the world is perfect.

Far from it.

He’s just making sure the good parts get some airtime too, and on the days when the headlines get a bit much, that turns out to be worth an awful lot.

You can follow along at @the_happy_broadcast or thehappybroadcast.com.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

We often treat sadness like a fault in our system.

Something has gone wrong, and it needs fixing so we can get back to feeling good.

So we chase the good feeling.

We try to arrange a life with the sad bits filed off, all peaks and no valleys, permanently sunny.

But a life like that wouldn't actually be blissful.

It would be flat.

Happiness only means something because you know its opposite.

Take away every low, and the highs stop registering as highs.

They just begin to mirror the temperature of the room.

Oddly enough, chasing pure happiness can work against you.

Berkeley psychologist Iris Mauss ran a series of studies on people who place a very high value on being happy, the ones who make it their number-one goal.

You'd expect them to be the happiest of the lot.

Often though, they're among the least.

When happiness is the target, you end up grading every moment against it.

That dinner was nice, but was it happy enough?

The holiday was okay, but couldn't it have been better?

The higher you set the bar, the more ordinary life looks like it's falling short, and the more let down you feel.

Sadness plays a more useful role than we give it credit for.

It's the contrast that lets the good moments land.

Joy needs a backdrop, the same way a candle needs the dark to make any impression at all.

Strip out the shadow, and you don't end up with more light.

You’re left with a white wall.

Stop treating sadness as a malfunction: When a low mood rolls in, you don't have to rush to fix it or explain it away. Let it be part of the day. It's doing a job, even when it doesn't always feel like it.

Lower the bar on happy: A good life isn't one long highlight reel. Aim for a life that's mostly decent with true peaks within it, and you'll enjoy those peaks far more than someone holding out for constant sunshine.

Let the contrast teach you: Next time you feel genuinely happy, notice what it's sitting alongside: the hard stretch you just came through, that thing you almost lost. That backdrop is part of why the moment feels as good as it does.

There's an intentional irony in writing a newsletter called The Brighter Side of Everything.

People sometimes assume it means I believe everything needs to be sunny.

That I've somehow chosen to opt out of the hard days.

I haven't, and I'd be no use to you if I had.

The brighter side only exists because there's also a darker one.

I know what a good week feels like because I know exactly what a bad one feels like.

The weeks I've spent in genuinely low places have taught me more about optimism than the easy ones ever did.

It's okay to have bad days.

Just don't let them define you.

Take a break, do something that brings you joy.

Remember that tomorrow is a new day.

What I aim for now is a life with room for the whole range, the joy and the ache both, each one making the other more real.

When the sad days come, and they inevitably will, I let them in rather than try to slam the door.

Because they’re part of the machinery that makes a good life possible.

So, if a low patch arrives, resist the urge to treat it as a problem to solve.

Let it run its course.

It's part of what will make your next bright day shine.

P.S. Everything above is about the ordinary low days, the ones that come and go. But sometimes a low doesn't lift. If you find the dark settling in and staying, if it starts to feel heavier or longer than a passing sadness, please treat that one differently. That's not something to push through on your own. Talk to your doctor, or to someone you trust. Reaching out for help is one of the most hopeful things a person can do.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

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