About this site

optimistic.day is a calendar with a thought for every day. Each thought comes with a short accompanying text and an image by Anna Atkins. You can read today’s entry or browse the archive. Next year, you’ll encounter the same thoughts again — perhaps a different passage will catch your attention then.

The collection began with Stoic thoughts. Since then, writers, naturalists and philosophers from other traditions have joined Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. I’m interested in their attempts to understand themselves: how they notice their own habits, question a belief or change their minds.

The accompanying texts

I wanted to collect a thought for every day and put something beside it that would let me follow the thought further. An anecdote, a story or an observation, sometimes a question.

That’s how the accompanying texts came about. They bring in people and events that a sentence might not have made me think of. Something a person did or experienced can take a thought in a direction that reading alone might not have suggested. Sometimes a story makes the sentence more difficult, too. Then it stays with me in a different way.

Anna Atkins

I discovered Anna Atkins through one of these texts. Her name appeared in it, and I looked at her images. Until then, I hadn’t known her work. That gave me the idea of showing her plates on optimistic.day.

For me, Anna Atkins’s images also sit beside the thought. Seaweed on a beach is so familiar that we often barely look at it. In her plates, I suddenly see the fine branching, the shapes and how different the individual specimens are. Something familiar reveals another side when I look at it closely and with more attention.

I’m also fascinated by how these images came into being. Atkins brought her botanical knowledge and her experience as an illustrator together with a photographic process that had only just been invented. The plants themselves left their pale forms on the blue paper. From this she developed the first photographically illustrated book, issued in parts from 1843. Every plate in every copy had to be exposed individually. She had seen a new possibility and, through years of work, made something that had never existed before.

The plates here are facsimiles from the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections. You can see the edges, the labels and the differences between individual sheets. I wanted to show them this way because these traces belong to the images too.

Perhaps there’s something of the optimism I associate with this site in that: there’s still something to discover in a familiar thought or a piece of seaweed on the beach. I can look at something again and find myself thinking differently.

More about Anna Atkins, her process and her cyanotypes ›

AI helps me write

I often have a sense of what interests me about a thought, but struggle to find the words for it myself. With AI, I can look for stories, try out ways of phrasing things and keep working on a text until I recognise what I wanted to say.

I read the drafts, choose and revise them. Sometimes it’s only a phrase that doesn’t fit that helps me realise what I actually mean. The thought continues to unfold in that process too.