The Art of Conscious Curation

How changing the soundtrack of ordinary moments became my quiet rebellion

Hello, Protagonists,

Welcome back to Letters from the Creative Life. These occasional essays explore the quieter corners of living: small reflections on art, ambition, and the tender balancing act of building a meaningful life in a noisy world. Think of them as letters from my life to yours. Enjoy!

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Photo by Shivansh Sethi on Unsplash

The Art of Conscious Curation

I’m learning to run to gentle French pop music, and it’s changing everything.

Usually when you embark on a workout, the soundtrack is pounding dance music or aggressive techno. But I am too old for that. At 46, I yearn for something motivational but less… harsh.

So instead, I lace up my shoes and cue up something soft and beautiful (like the French-and-Italian duet by Andrea Bocelli and Kendji Girac).

Do you know what it’s like to move to music like that?

You’re not stumble-running anymore. You’re soaring.

In the past, I’ve tried Couch to 5K apps that tell you exactly how long to jog (90 seconds or so) and how long to walk before you start jogging again. I managed to stick to the programs for two or three weeks, then I’d fall out of them, whether out of boredom or “this is too hard”-ness or both.

But something magical happens when you change the soundtrack of an ordinary struggle. Suddenly, I’m not forcing my body through punishing intervals. I’m gliding deliciously through honey, in a moment I’ve consciously chosen to make beautiful.

This is how you elevate the mundane to the extraordinary.

It’s Only Boring If You Let It Be So

There’s an art to choosing the soundtrack, the pace, the frame for our day-to-day moments. I don’t mean we ought to force beauty where it doesn’t belong (life is not an endless “romanticized” Instagram post). But what I do mean is that we have more creative control over the texture of our days than we realize.

Take my mornings with War and Peace. I started reading one chapter each day as part of a slow reads group—partly to get off my phone in the mornings, partly to reclaim some quiet before the world makes its demands. But it became something more when I started treating it like a ritual worth savoring.

I have my coffee first, because I’m really not a morning person. Then, once the caffeine hits my bloodstream, I prop open that giant paperback on three coasters stacked in front of me, so the book sits at just the right angle, and I eat my oatmeal slowly while I read. Sometimes it’s just one chapter. Other times, it’s two or three if I don’t have anywhere urgent to be.

I eat the same breakfast every single morning. But the conscious curation of this sliver of time transforms it. Suddenly I’m the kind of person who lingers over a classic in the morning, who treats an ordinary meal like a small ceremony of attention.

The Gentle Rebellion

There’s something quietly subversive about this practice. In a world that celebrates the grind and the hustle, choosing to move slowly through your own life feels like a small act of rebellion.

This isn’t about demonizing hard workouts or lofty goals—if you read my essay on soft ambition, you know I also want to chase big dreams.

But it’s also important to give ourselves permission to pick beauty over efficiency sometimes. To choose presence over productivity.

What do your evenings look like? It’s easy to default to scrolling or mindlessly browsing Netflix. Tom and I used to do this. But now, we pause to ask ourselves if we’re just going through the motions, or if there is something more lovely, more satisfying, we could do with our time.

The answer is often to do less, not more. Rather than watching a movie we don’t really care about, or to keep up with the latest show, we whip up a box of Ghiradelli brownies and when it’s done, take it outside to our balcony where we watch the sunset together while eating dessert straight out of the pan.

It’s nothing big. It’s boxed mix and a free sunset. But this cozy time feels like an indulgence we’ve created out of thin air, simply by slowing down and noticing the possibility for something special in the midst of the ordinary.

The Wonder of Small Choices

What changes in these elevated moments isn’t the circumstances themselves; it’s my relationship to them. I feel a swell of wonder that I can create these tiny pockets of beauty for myself out of nothing. It’s like putting a filter on life that makes everything a little sunnier, or a little more luxurious, through the simple choice of seeing mundane moments as worthy of care.

We get to be the artists of our own ordinary lives.

Sometimes you’re rushing because you actually need to get somewhere. Sometimes you’re in a creative flow state and the last thing you want is to be overly conscious of each passing minute.

But in between those moments—in the morning with your tea, folding laundry with music, in the evening with a book—there are opportunities to choose the soundtrack. When you start treating the prosaic moments of your life as songs worth listening to, everything begins to feel a little more alive.

And maybe that’s the real art: not just living your life, but consciously composing it, one small, elevated note at a time.

How do you stop to smell the roses? I'd love to hear about the ordinary corners of your life that you've learned to see as beautiful.

As a parting gift, I leave you with this. May you soar today.