The Good List: 6 Things to Add Joy to Your Day

I don’t generally just present an inspiring news story and say, “Here, this is good.” But I came across one this week that was so moving I can’t help myself.

It happened in Sydney, Australia, during a live performance of the score from the musical “La La Land.” The keyboard player fell ill, and a 21-year-old student among the 2,000 audience members jumped onstage to fill in.

The guy was finishing up a degree in international relations. But this experience gave him the confidence to pursue music as a career. Your whole life can turn around in an instant! Herein, some more things that might transform your life a little or a lot.

Every evening at dusk, a bunch of pigeons (or, if you prefer, rock doves) roost on the rooftop just outside my kitchen window in Brooklyn. I’ve been watching them for years: their purple and green plumage, the occasional tussles they get into with one another. They’re reliable, arriving just as the light begins to change, abiding there on the ledge, peering and preening. I’m convinced they’re watching me back.

Saturday is National Pigeon Appreciation Day, an occasion I’ll admit I’ve never before acknowledged, largely because I did not know of its existence until the algorithm notified me, possibly because of my history of searching Instagram for dancing birds. Why celebrate? Why not celebrate the creatures who served as our postal system for thousands of years? And we’re still figuring out how they did it.

It’s long been known that pigeons use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. Now, scientists have discovered that they may detect direction via magnetic particles in their livers. (Perhaps “pigeon-livered” should be a descriptor for someone with a good sense of direction?)

So won’t you join me in Pigeon Appreciation this year? There may be peristeronic (who knew?) events near you: A full day of festivities at the American Pigeon Museum in Oklahoma City. A yoga class where “you’ll be guided to embrace the energy and spirit of the birds’ freedom of flight” in Fredericksburg, Virginia. A Brooklyn screening of a documentary, “Pigeon Religion,” about “New Yorkers whose lives have become intertwined with the city’s most misunderstood bird.” And, no matter where you find yourself, here’s a few mesmerizing seconds of a giant pigeon dancing to jazz.

2.

Collective effervescence

To watch the N.B.A. finals, I’ve been seeking out bars where rowdy patrons holler at the television screen in either joy or devastation at every pass and shot. I was telling a sociologist friend about how much more fun it was to watch with a crew of fans than at home alone and she introduced me to the term “collective effervescence.”

It was coined by Emile Durkheim, the 19th century founder of sociology as an academic discipline, and describes that electric, unifying feeling generated by a communal experience. I decided to read up on the phenomenon and learned that “it includes feelings of being ‘swept away’ and ‘becoming one with the crowd’” as well as “a sensation of ‘awe’ or being in touch with the sacred.” Isn’t that a perfect way to distill that feeling of high-fiving with beer-sloshing strangers — or laughing in unison in a crowded theater, or listening to live music among devotees who sing every lyric?

I’m so glad to have this language at the ready, not only to describe that sensation, but also as a goal. I plan to collectively effervesce tonight for Game 4 and urge you to do the same.

3.

Where is that stew from?

Here we go again with a simple guessing game that makes you feel superior or humbled, depending on your specialized knowledge. Foodguessr presents you with a photo, ingredients and a description of a dish, and you have to guess what country it’s from. Bruschetta (Italy) came easily. So did chocolate brownie (United States). But I didn’t get hochepot, a stew from Belgium/France, or the traditional Scandinavian lutefisk.

“Sometimes I roam around at night and do things like put Chapstick on my kids while they’re asleep,” my friend Indrani texted me recently.

We’d been discussing how we’re both very light sleepers. We agreed we’d both wake up instantly if someone were to touch our lips while we slumbered.

Afterward, I kept thinking about how sweet it is that she tends to her adolescent sons’ chapped lips in the night, and wondered about the other invisible things people do for those they love.

Sports Illustrated commissioned 48 digital versions of its magazine cover, one for every team competing in the World Cup. They are illustrated by artists with ties to each country. Click on a cover and you get — in English or Spanish — a rundown of the team’s uniforms, key players, first-round schedule and pretty much anything else one might need to cram for the tournament, which begins on Thursday.

I’ll admit I’m not as conversant in soccer as I’d like to be, so I’ve been spending a lot of time with that and The Athletic’s team guides trying to shore up my bona fides. I’m not about to pass up another opportunity for collective effervescence!

I casually collect the picture books I loved as a child, in the editions that I checked out from the library in the 1970s and ’80s. I say casually because I’m not a completist, and I don’t display the books or even actively seek them out; I just pick them up as I encounter them in the wild. I love perusing the children’s section of a used bookstore, where I might happen upon an old copy of “Caps for Sale” or “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” or some other book I’d forgotten I loved until that very moment.

The next best thing to that experience is the Instagram account for Oly Oly Oxen Free Books. There, the owner, Kate Humphreys, posts illustrations and covers of the vintage books in her online shop. “Bread and Jam for Frances”! “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble”! I would never have remembered how much I loved “The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes,” but one glimpse of the illustration by Barbara Cooney and I’m transported.

The Oly Oly Oxen Free Instagram account functions as a nostalgia engine. As Humphreys said in an interview a couple of years ago: “Children’s media is so intimately tied to our upbringing that it’s impossible to separate the two. The book comes to represent a time, a place, and a moment, which is truly powerful!”

One more thing: Amy Haywood Hughes, a reader from Georgia sent this dispatch from an R.E.I. parking lot in Atlanta: “Beauty from tragedy. Gummy bears sparkling like gems in the sunshine scattered atop crackled black asphalt.”