Sometimes the smallest moments of joy are the only ones that feel possible. That’s what Nora McInerny learned in 2014, when she lost her 35-year-old husband and her father to cancer and her second baby to miscarriage—all within the span of eight weeks.

Her husband, Aaron, was a “naturally buoyant person,” says McInerny, who’s the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking and author of the upcoming book Bad Vibes Only. “He just had this otherworldly ability to find the fun and the joy in anything,” she says. “I learned from him the importance of staying as present as possible in the moment, even when the moment sucks. Even as he was literally dying, he could make me laugh.” (Among Aaron’s final words to his wife: “I will always be with you … so you need to stop picking your nose.”)

It was a moment she remembers with levity, plucked out of an unbearable time. During these past few years—plagued by political strife, social unrest, and, well, an actual plague—many of us have struggled to even briefly escape morose moods. But experts say that incorporating just a little bit of joy into our lives can disproportionately enhance our well-being by reducing the risk of chronic illness, strengthening the immune system, and combating stress.

“I think joy feels sometimes like a really big emotion—like crazy happiness,” McInerny says. “But it can be a small point of light in the darkness. It doesn’t have to be throwing the light on in the dark.”

Remind me—what’s joy again.     .     ?

Joy is the state of feeling freedom, safety, and ease. Unlike some other positive emotions, like compassion and contentment, experiencing joy often depends on preparing for it, rather than spontaneously feeling it, says Philip C. Watkins, a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University who’s authored many of the leading research papers on joy.

One of the best ways to usher in joy is to strengthen bonds with friends and family. “The most intense joy experiences are probably experienced in relationships,” he says. Filling your life with meaningful goals and purpose is also essential, Watkins notes, as is cultivating an open mindset—and not just to the good stuff. “If you’re open to joy, you have to be open to disappointment,” he says. “Paradoxically, in terms of experiencing joy, there has to be a willingness to experience loss and sadness.”

If you’re not sure how to go about sparking joy, start with some self-reflection, advises Brie Scolaro, a licensed social worker and co-director of the New York City-based and LGBTQ-focused Aspire Psychotherapy. First, take an inventory of what joy means to you, and when you last experienced it. Ask yourself: What’s standing in your way of feeling joyful?

Then, think back on your favorite, happiest moments. Doing so will trigger some of that same joyful energy (just as reflecting on sad memories will make you feel upset). It will also give you a hint of how to achieve more joy in the future.

Next, “make a plan to bridge the gap between what you know brings you joy and what you’re currently feeling,” Scolaro says. What actionable steps can you take today to increase your odds of experiencing joy?

Finally, make sure you’re present enough to soak in joy when it washes over you. “Are you listening to your friends speak? Are you tasting the beer that you’re drinking? You have to be able to register joy,” Scolaro says. “Joy is in the moment. Building the capacity to move back to the present moment—like through meditation—is the best way I can think of to be present to joy.”

Here are a few ways to achieve small moments of joy in dark times

Make a joy bucket list

Robin Shear, a life coach, speaker, and author based in Detroit, has an emergency plan for those inevitable times when everything feels awful. Instead of spiraling—and it would be so easy to hop on the merry-go-round of doom—she turns to her “joy bucket list,” a tally of all the things that make her joyful: test-driving fast cars, being spontaneous, sharing new experiences with her family. She suggests others do the same, storing it in their phone or some other easily accessible place.

Having a physical reminder is helpful, “because there will be times in your life when you don’t feel joy. When life really hurts—and when you’re needing to rise out of that—it can be difficult to think about what will bring you joy again,” says Shear. “If you already did the work and made your list on a scrap of paper, you’ll find it’s much less challenging.”

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Incorporate daily habits you look forward to

Every morning, Deborah J. Cohan has a cup of coffee in a colorful ceramic mug. She begins looking forward to it the evening before. Another favorite part of her day: Going for a nighttime swim under the stars. “I think there’s something about joy that’s multisensory,” says Cohan, a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. “You smell it, you taste it, you see it—it’s a heightened sensory experience.” Think about ways to schedule pleasurable habits into your day. Then savor the anticipation of them, because that’s part of the magic.

Find a palatable way to express gratitude

There’s strong research indicating that gratitude fuels well-being. But sometimes it feels like too much of a stretch—or, as McInerny puts it, like “a blunt-force object to force people into a better attitude.” If keeping a gratitude journal or otherwise expressing thanks isn’t a path to joy for you, think about more creative ways to reflect on and appreciate the good parts of your life.

When McInerny’s son broke his arm right before the summer, he was sentenced to a giant cast that rendered him unable to swim or participate in other fun activities. “The day he got it off, he was like, ‘Say goodbye to my cast, Gerald,’” she says—revealing that even in a bummer situation, her son had created a cute, funny nickname for his orthopedic device. It reminded her to find something lighthearted and fun in every crummy situation. Now, she looks for a “daily Gerald,” or one small thing that’s good about even a bad day.

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Have a short “recess” every day

You’re never too old for a recess break—a sentiment backed by ample research. Even short amounts of physical activity, in particular, can elevate your moodand cut the risk of depression. Shear likes to schedule a 5- or 10-minute play session once or twice a day. “It’s an appointment with yourself. And whenever that time comes, you stop what you’re doing and get to spend a few minutes doing whatever makes you feel good,” she says. Shear has spent recess breaks hula-hooping, for example, and likes to set a fun ringtone on her phone as a notification that it’s go time—the adult version of a recess bell.

Look for connection

When McInerny gets lost in a black hole of gloominess, she calls someone she loves. The conversation might last just a few minutes, but that’s enough to lift her up.

When she’s particularly overwhelmed, she looks for other small, tangible ways to connect: If she goes for a walk, she’ll try to catch someone’s eye. Or she might mail a friend a card. “Whatever I can do to feel connected to other people is really helpful,” she says.

Dance it out

Music is a reliable way to spark a few minutes of joy, says Melanie Harth, a psychologist based in Santa Fe, N.M. She suggests making a happiness playlist full of upbeat, inspiring songs that make you want to bust a move, and then turning it on whenever your spirits start to falter. “I dare anybody to go on YouTube and watch Pharrell Williams’ Happy or Sara Bareilles’ Brave and not feel a little better”—or give up on your gloom and start dancing, she says.

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Help someone, or something

Robust research indicates that helping other people, or getting involved with a cause that’s important to you, is correlated with well-being. Look for an opportunity to give back, in even a small way: by planting a tree, donating blood, or contributing to a friend’s online fundraiser. “It can help us get out of our scary little minds and into something that’s more important,” Harth says. “And it can also help catalyze an unexpected moment of joy. You never know when that’s going to happen.”
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.         .        .

J                       O                      Y
maybe you find it most
when you create it in others.          .          .

Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, still remembers an advertisement for cold medicine he saw in late 2019. The ad showed a visibly sick businessman walking through an airport, “and the message was, ‘You can solider through this. You can make it,’” McDade says.

That message didn’t age well. Only a few months later, the virus that causes COVID-19 began spreading across the globe, prompting health officials to beg people to stay home no matter what—but especially if they felt sick. Suddenly, soldiering through an illness wasn’t seen as admirable, but irresponsible, selfish, and dangerous.

Since then, countless op-eds and articles have argued that the pandemic would usher in a “new normal” where people were more thoughtful about disease, companies were more generous with sick time, and everyone stayed home when unwell. It looked like it was happening, at least for a while. Millions of people worked and learned from home, many for the first time; comparing symptoms became a national pastime; and photos of at-home test strips crowded out vacation shots on social media.

But now, with the pandemic effectively over—at least in terms of the federal response, if not epidemiologically—it seems that the promised new normal never fully materialized.

Eric Shattuck, an assistant professor of research at the University of Texas at San Antonio, studies “sickness behavior:” the constellation of behavioral changes that people adopt when they’re ill, like lethargy, social withdrawal, and decreased appetite. Much of sickness behavior is biological, driven largely by inflammation in the body. But the extent to which people perform these behaviors is informed by cultural norms about how we’re “supposed” to act when sick, Shattuck says.

Though pushes to stay home and “flatten the curve” changed behavior early in the pandemic, they weren’t enough to enduringly alter dominant cultural messages about sucking it up and soldiering through, Shattuck says—in large part because they weren’t backed up by supportive policy changes, like expanded access to paid sick leave and affordable child care.

“We may see that people are paying more attention and listening to their bodies more,” Shattuck says, “but if the conditions aren’t there for them to be able to stay home or work from home…it may not actually change the large-scale behaviors.”

The start of the pandemic brought a flurry of new sick- and family-leave policies, but many were temporary or didn’t apply equally to all workers. As of March 2022, 77% of private-industry workers had access to paid sick time, only slightly more than the 75% who did in March 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). But that top-line statistic doesn’t tell the whole story.

While 96% of people working in the management, business, and financial sectors had access to paid sick time in 2022 (along with the option to work remotely in many cases), only 62% of service-industry workers did—up slightly from 59% in 2020. Only about 40% of the lowest-paid private-industry workers had paid sick time in 2022, versus nearly all of the highest earners, BLS data show.

Overall, during the first two years of the pandemic, only 42% of work absences related to illness, child care, or personal obligations were compensated, according to a report from the Urban Institute, an economic and policy research institute. Many workers, especially those least able to afford it, still have to choose between getting well and getting paid. It’s hard to fault people for choosing the latter.

Even people who have paid sick time often work through their illnesses, and that didn’t change during the pandemic. In some respects, says Kai Ruggeri, an assistant professor at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health who studies population behavior, the rise of remote work actually made it harder for people to justify taking sick time. Lots of people seemed to think, “‘What’s the difference, if you get some things done from your laptop in bed?’” Ruggeri says.

In 2020, researchers surveyed people with COVID-like symptoms about whether they worked while sick. (About a quarter of them ended up testing positive for COVID-19, while the rest had other respiratory illnesses.) About 42% of people with COVID-19 worked either remotely or in-person while sick, and 63% of people sick with another respiratory illness did so. One 2023 study even found that, within a group of about 250 health care workers with symptomatic COVID-19, half worked at least part of a day anyway.

That may be because many workers still feel pressure—spoken or unspoken—from their employers to show up no matter their health status, says Terri Rhodes, CEO of the Disability Management Employer Coalition, which provides employers with guidance on workplace absences. The pandemic didn’t change that. “The general feeling that I get from employers is, ‘We just want to be done with [the pandemic],’” Rhodes says. “There’s a big push right now for productivity and earnings and ‘just get back to work,’ as opposed to mental health, well-being, taking sick days.”

The old normal—the one valuing stoicism, productivity, not stopping for a second—has proven hard to uproot. But there have been changes around the way we think about illness: the fact that people are even talking about sick-leave policies and forming opinions about the merits of vaccinations and masks (for better or for worse) suggests there’s been a culture shift around health and sickness, Ruggeri says.

As director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Hall Jamieson oversees research projects that assess how much the U.S. population knows about health and science. Over the course of the pandemic, Jamieson says, she’s seen two contradictory things happen in parallel: overall scientific literacy grew, even as more people began to believe conspiracy theories and misinformation.

The fact that most of the U.S. population got vaccinated and wore masks at the height of the pandemic suggests most people generally understood how the virus spreads and how to slow transmission, Jamieson says. In a survey fielded around the time COVID-19 vaccines became available to the general public, around three-quarters of respondents correctly answered questions about the safety and efficacy of the shots. Results like those show “an astonishing level of public literacy about a topic that we knew nothing about in January 2020,” Jamieson says.

Concepts once foreign to most of the general public—like incubation periods and airborne transmission—also became part of regular conversation. “Nobody knew what an R value was” before, Ruggeri says. “I had people calling me, asking me to explain it to them.”

For many people, the pandemic was a first introduction to a “blind spot” in the medical world, as a 2022 research review put it: post-acute illness. Viruses ranging from influenza to Epstein-Barr can cause potentially debilitating long-term complications, but that reality went mostly unnoticed until scores of people developed Long COVID symptoms—ranging from brain fog and memory loss to chronic fatigue and pain—within roughly the same period of time. For some people in both the medical field and the general public, these long-term symptoms reframed what a seemingly “mild” illness could do.

In addition to increased scientific literacy, Dr. Yuka Manabe, a professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine who specializes in infectious disease, has noticed a stronger desire for “diagnostic certainty” among patients. In 2019, someone with a respiratory illness might have been content to say they were sick and leave it at that, but many patients now want to know exactly what they have and where they caught it. “I hear a lot of people say, ‘I have a cold, but don’t worry because it’s not COVID—I tested myself,’” Manabe says.

The unprecedented availability of at-home tests likely contributed to that desire for certainty—and consumer demand for COVID-19 diagnostics seems to have carried over to other conditions, too. In a 2022 survey, 82% of adults ages 50 to 80 said they were at least somewhat interested in using at-home tests in the future. And they may indeed get the chance. In February 2023, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the first combined at-home influenza and COVID-19 test.

But while COVID-19 turned some people into amateur disease detectives, many others—about 40% of U.S. adults, according to federal data—delayed or avoided health care during the pandemic. One 2022 study found that lower-income people and those with preexisting conditions were likely to delay care in 2021, which suggests that financial stress and fear of the virus played a role. Another study from 2022 found that people were more likely to skip doctors’ visits during the pandemic if they’d previously had bad experiences with medical care.

It makes sense that people who’d had previous bad experiences—a group that tends to include people of color, lower-income people, those without insurance—may have shied away from the medical establishment during the crisis, even as others literally trusted it with their lives. Throw in partisan polarization, which made even basic practices like masking and vaccination feel like political statements, and it’s no wonder that people responded very differently to the same health threat. How could there be a single new normal when the old normal varied so much by race, class, gender, and age?

Despite the divisions, however, Jamieson says she’s optimistic that at least some of the knowledge gained during the pandemic will stick around, ready to be deployed if and when there’s a similar threat in the future. For many people, behaviors like masking and handwashing became habitual during the pandemic, and “you don’t unlearn habitual behaviors,” Jamieson says.

Although far fewer people wear masks now than at the height of the pandemic, Manabe says she’s noticed that people are now quicker to wear one when they have respiratory symptoms—a sign, she thinks, that people understand how pathogens spread and want to protect others.

“This kind of social altruism is really welcome, from my point of view,” Manabe says. “We’re trying to move forward as a society in the post-COVID era.”
We know where we have come these past some 36 months but like always we’re not all that clear to just exactly where we are as if it’s still yet to be determined.  

It seems like the World has not just turned upside down but actually changed its Shape.  The Caring Catalyst in us has either become more Caring or less of a Catalyst for a loving change.          .           .

Did this pandemic actually really change us.        .        . Was it for the better;
was it for the worse or really, is it just business back to usual once again?  It all really not only determines how we normally become, but hopefully continue to be as a Caring Catalyst, that we always were, and still are, and always hope to be.    .    .
Or maybe that’s the real Pandemic, One with no vaccine or protected by the safest of Masks; The One that separates us; keeps us apart; sheltering out of place, forever out of place.          .           .

Extolled by politicians and pop stars alike, it seems like everyone is talking about self-love these days. In a Vogue make-up tutorial, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains that loving yourself is “the one foundation of everything.” Nicole LaPera, the clinical psychologist behind the popular Instagram account, @theholisticpsychologist, tells her 6.4 million followers, “Self-love is our natural state.” And in her most recent chart-topping hit, “Flowers,” Miley Cyrus sings proudly, “I can love me better than you can.”

Self-love has become the core tenant of modern wellness culture, with the promise that what follows self-love is good health and freedom. In her book, The Self-Love Experiment, author Sharon Kaiser claims, “Whether you want to achieve weight loss, land your dream job, find your soulmate, or get out of debt, it all comes back to self-love and accepting yourself first.”

At this point, it doesn’t feel like much of a stretch to say that the self-love phenomenon is bordering on a societal obsession. The question is: why?

Today, we live in a climate where needing help can evoke shame and embarrassment, where cut-throat competition takes precedence over compassionate collaboration, and where self-sufficiency is celebrated as the ultimate achievement. To navigate the harsh terrain of radical individualism, self-love has emerged as our tool for survival. But it can come at a cost, especially when the type of self-love we turn to is the kind that has been manipulated by corporate ad campaigns and social media. In its commodified form, self-love is not really self-love at all; instead, it’s more like self-sabotage, convincing us to hyperfocus on ourselves at the expense of connecting with others.

While the exact origin of self-love remains unclear, one of the first psychologists to address the concept was Eric Fromm. In his 1956 book, The Art of Loving, he wrote, “Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love toward themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others.” For Fromm, self-love operated as a necessary condition for relating with our fellow humans.

Going back further in history, we see other cultures referring to self-love as a channel for connection. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle claimed that self-love in its most virtuous form serves as a model for how we should love our friends. In the 13th century, Sufist poet Rumi wrote of the importance of recognizing the divine within oneself to feel one with the greater universe. And the ancient Buddhist practice of Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, involves practitioners directing love inwards so that they can then extend love outwards.

The self-love many of us have grown accustomed to today, however, veers from its authentic origin. Chewed up and spit out by toxic consumerism, it has been drained of its relational potential. Instead, it is often used by corporations and influencers alike to sell products and keep people hyper fixated on themselves. It is a force of isolation, rather than attachment.

When we take a moment to consider the culture we’re living in, where loneliness rates are at unprecedented highs, touch deprivation is a serious concern, and polarizing animosity has replaced empathic connection, it begins to make sense why we’ve sought refuge in self-love. To survive in our fractured world, we’ve been left with little choice but to turn inwards for affection.

Study after study shows that we’re living inside of a growing loneliness epidemic. In a recent survey conducted by Cigna, researchers found that almost 80% of adults from the ages of 18 to 24 reported feeling lonely. In 2018, even before the start of COVID-19 pandemic, one study showed that 54% of Americans felt like no one in their life knew them well.

Dr. Dan Siegel, clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, attributes such jarring isolation to what he calls our “culture of separation.” In his latest book, Intraconnected, Seigel writes that our society “emphasizes separation rather than connection, independence rather than interdependence, individuality rather than a shared identity.” Ultimately, our prevailing cultural emphasis on excessive autonomy and self-reliance has engendered a society rife with disconnection.

We can see examples of this on social media, where it is common for women to be bombarded—under the guise of self-love and self-care—with advertisements for Botox and pilates machines, advanced skin care wands and organic hair growth serums. Such products don’t serve to bring women closer together; instead, they promote self-preoccupation, negative social comparison, and rattling insecurity.

Influencer culture, as another example, keeps the lines blurred between self-love and self-involvement. Narcissism is not only normalized, but rewarded by likes, follows, and corporate sponsorships. This, of course, comes at the detriment of influencers and followers alike, as both report experiencing a diminishment in psychological well-being.

When self-love becomes entangled with self-absorption and materialism, serious consequences emerge for our collective mental health. Studies show that too much focus on oneself is associated with anxiety and depression. Past research has also documented the vicious feedback loop of consumption and loneliness: When we purchase material possessions (even in the name of self-love), we surprisingly feel lonely, so we try and soothe ourselves through buying more, but this only makes us feel worse. This takes a toll on our health, as loneliness has been linked to increased inflammation, heart disease, and even premature death.

Self-love is a powerful tool; it can be used for good or bad, for connection or disconnection. And at a time of such immense social fragmentation, we need to cultivate the kind that brings us together. So how exactly do we do this?

Primarily, it requires introspection. We can know we’re practicing healthy self-love when we feel connected to our bodies and our communities. There are many iterations of what this may look like. Perhaps we choose to prioritize rest and replenishment one night so that we can be more engaged the next time we see our friends. Or maybe we decide to quit our high stress job, so that we can stop neglecting our needs and spend more time with the people and places we enjoy. True self-love not only bolsters our capacity for connection, but it also helps us become an actualized version of ourselves.

On the other hand, self-love through the warped filter of radical individualism tends to make us feel alienated, disconnected, and stuck in our own heads. This looks like buying a “self-care” product that causes us to ruminate on our appearance or justifying our anxious avoidance of meaningful social commitments through the co-opted language of self-compassion. It’s vital, then, that we begin actively recognizing when more nefarious forces are being disguised and packaged to us as self-love, and when we, ourselves, are consciously or unconsciously buying into them.

Our culture of separation carries a strong current. It’s easy to get pulled in, to become swept away by its riptide. But if we can achieve the balance between caring for ourselves and caring for others, real self-love may just very well be our life raft.

It can be really hard to
SELF LOVE
when you don’t much
SELF LIKE.         .         .
(but just remember)

Pick a specific, realistic goal

People often start setting goals with a little too much gusto, trying to overhaul many aspects of their life at once. But that can quickly become overwhelming and backfire. “It’s better to have a systematic approach and identify the one or two that are the most important,” Smoll says.

Making your goal specific can help you follow through on it; research suggests that narrowly defining a goal helps you clarify the tasks necessary for reaching it. “You should define your goal discretely enough to measure and use it effectively,” Smoll says.

It should also be realistic, says Zander Fryer, founder of the coaching company High Impact Coaching. He’s a fan of the Goldilocks-sized goal. “If it’s too big, it will scare you off; too small, and it won’t motivate you,” he says. “Each individual must figure out the goal that gets them moving.” To stay accountable, give yourself a timeline that you can achieve, recommends Fryer. “That will motivate you to take action.”

Create a plan of attack

Whenever you set one goal, you should actually set two: a process goal and product goal, Smoll says. Aiming for a 4.0 grade-point average would be a product goal: the ultimate objective. A process goal would outline the steps it takes to get there. While the product goal gets all the attention, the process goal is equally vital.

Write down a plan for how you’ll go about achieving your end goal, identifying specific strategies. If a hockey player wants to get 5% faster, for instance, “a productive achievement strategy could include skating additional 10 sprints after practice each day,” Smoll says.

Jason Bahamundi, who has completed eight Ironman races and 30 ultramarathons, sets a process goal before every race. “I think a lot about the training, the timing and the cost of what I’m undertaking,” he says. “If I can think about the challenge and then work backwards, I’m successful.”

Be accountable to yourself and others

Setting the goal is the fun part. Sticking to it is tougher. “You will hit barriers and fears,” Fryer says, so accountability is important, especially at the beginning. “Having a mentor, a partner or social accountability will help when you reach a sticking point.”

Fryer recommends choosing someone who you don’t want to disappoint, paying for a mentor or accountability partner or finding someone with similar objectives through a professional or social media group. This person can help by defining clear expectations, focusing on performance and monitoring progress.

Honing your patience will be helpful as well. “Remind yourself that achieving a goal takes persistence, drive and resilience,” Fryer says. “Set your expectations that it will be harder and take longer than you expect.”

That means recognizing when you might need to stop and catch your breath. Bahamundi knows how to guard against mental fatigue by building breaks into his process, particularly when he’s preparing for long events. “I train hard for three weeks at a time and then take a full recovery week,” he says. Cycling through work and rest can help you avoid burnout in any endeavor, whether you’re aiming to lose weight, improve a relationship or launch a big career change.

Find joy in the process

Savoring how it feels to chase your goal is useful for maintaining motivation long term, says Brad Stulberg, a performance coach and co-founder of the Growth Equation. “Most people cycle through three stages: the grind of putting your head down and doing the work, anger and fear of failure, and enjoyment,” he says. But finding joy in showing up for the work is essential throughout the whole process and shouldn’t be left for the end. “Before you take on a goal, visualize the process and how it makes you feel,” Stulberg says. “If you become tight and constricted, it’s probably not the right goal or time. If you feel open and curious, that’s a good sign.”

The process won’t uplift you all the time, so it’s important to mark the little achievements en route to the big prize. “As you make progress along the way, celebrate each of the smaller steps,” says Smoll. “I like the saying ‘Yard by yard is hard, but inch by inch, it’s a cinch.’ Self validation is very motivating.”

When you do reach the finish line, you might just find that the process—not the product—was the real prize. “I know that every day I’m out there working is putting me in a better position to be successful on race day,” Bahamundi says. “The race is my celebratory lap for all the hard work I’ve put in.”

THIS KIND OF SUMS UP A LOT OF OUR
GOALS
RESOLUTIONS
RESOLVES
f  e  e  l  i  n  g     s
this time of the year
as we rear view mirror
where we’ve been
and windshield
where we are headed.            .             .
THE CAR 
JUST WON’T GO FAR
UNLESS YOU
S   T   A   R   T
I   T
(or put it in gear)
(or take your foot off the brake)
(or get in IT)
(OR__________________________________)

You can actually make your
T     I     C
T          A          L         K
.           .         .but WILL YOU?