I’ve spent the first days of September reading Alexander McCall Smith’s Sunshine on Scotland Street from his 44 Scotland Street series. If you haven’t experienced the joy of his books — he’s also the author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series — I suggest you run to the bookstore! The combination of intelligent writing, beautiful language, delicious humor and piercing truths is utterly irresistible. McCall Smith deals with the big questions through characters leading relatively ordinary and mundane lives. His books fuel my soul and occasionally make me laugh out loud.

Speaking of ordinary, I’ve found that many of the moments I end up cherishing at the end of the day are just that. Ordinary. Mundane tasks such as taking my time washing the car and polishing the rims. Or pulling weeds with the sun hitting my back and the radio playing in the background. I even enjoy picking up rotten apples from the lawn before mowing it. And oh, how I love mowing the lawn! Although these moments don’t make me laugh out loud — if you ever see me laughing out loud while mowing the lawn, please stop me — they certainly give me a sense of delicious, peaceful happiness.

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Last week I had my annual physical exam with my longtime primary physician in Beverly Hills. After he went through my test results, he concluded with a lecture I didn’t expect from him. He said the most important thing he wanted me to do for my health this year — apart from continuing to eat healthy and exercise — was to be grateful. “Don’t compare yourself to others,” he told me. “Don’t covet other people’s possessions. Eliminate envy. And try really hard to practice gratitude every day of your life.”

I’m not someone who is more envious than the average person. I don’t believe that’s why Dr. Joshua Trabulus concluded our particular meeting with this lecture. Instead, I suspect he sees an abundance of organic-eating, exercise-addicted people in his practice every day. And despite our focus on healthy living, the one thing we all have in common is the inability to see how wonderful our lives are, just the way they are right now.

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I visited my grandmother Elly this past week. She’s 95 years old and one of the most beautiful women in the world. She doesn’t have washboard abs or sculpted arms. She has never graced the cover of People magazine’s Worlds Most Beautiful issue or been included on Esquire’s list of the Sexiest Women Alive. Her legs don’t fit into skinny jeans and her feet will never again wear high heels. No one whistles in appreciation when she walks out of a room.

My grandmother’s hair is a soft gray and her hands are spotted with age. Her clothes are not by a brand name and her shoes are a pair of comfort sandals. She’s nursed five children and buried one. Her skin is wrinkled and heavy. But I don’t see any of this. I see how her eyes light up when she looks at me and how they dance when she laughs. I feel the kindness in her embrace, the softness of her skin and the love in her heart as she holds my hand. I know the wisdom of her soul and the passion she still has for life. That’s what I see, and it’s beautiful.

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Last week while driving home from my friend Caroline Lagerfelt’s house on the island of Gotland, I did something completely out of character. The sun was setting, the road was empty and my daughter was asleep in her car seat. I was zooming by endless fields of flowers when a track I used to listen to when driving in Los Angeles came on the radio. My favorite station KCRW always played mind-blowing music sessions on Friday nights, and here was one of my favorite tracks from that time in my life. On an impulse, I pulled the car over, opened the passenger door, turned the radio up and danced my heart out at the side of the road. No one saw me. If they had, I’m not sure if they would’ve laughed or cried! But man, was that fun. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t in a club, or that I was no longer 24 years old, or that I was alone or that I looked like a complete goofball. What mattered was that I acted on an instinct and allowed myself to be in the moment. You know when you feel complete free? When you’re fully experiencing the joy of being alive? It can come to you at any time. To me, it came by the roadside while listening to house music.

For this month’s Cover Story, I turned to actress Maria Bello to talk about what gives her life purpose. Maria is not one to cater to the media — she lives her life to the beat of her own drum — so to get an exclusive interview with her was very exciting to me. On Friday, I’ll announce the June giveaway and then it’s full steam ahead for the June issue with articles in all the regular sections plus the new Mindful Living. I would love to hear what you think. Enjoy!

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I used to practice Ashtanga yoga for years, trading my lunch hour for a yoga class at Mark Blanchard’s power yoga studio in Los Angeles. I even completed yoga teacher training with Mark and his wife, Elizabeth Folk Blanchard and ended up teaching in Sweden during my summer vacations. Yoga left me feeling peaceful, happy, connected and grateful. I was convinced I would always be a yoga practitioner.

But these past two years, I basically gave it up. Several 90-minute yoga sessions a week– while juggling three little kids and a full-time magazine job — felt overwhelming. Instead, I dove into high intensity interval training with trainer extraordinaire Thomas Roe. It was quicker, I got amazing results and I’d never had so much fun exercising in my whole life! But yoga, as everyone knows, is not only about keeping in shape. So this past month, I’ve showed up at my gym on Sunday mornings for an hour-long yoga session by myself. My hips are tight and and my crow pose is wobbly, but it doesn’t matter. I already feel more grounded, more myself. It’s a small step and it feels good!

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I felt such joy this past month creating content and planning new articles for Sweden With Love. Being able to do what feeds your soul and connecting with people who are passionate about living is such an energy boost! You wake up feeling curious about the world and excited about life’s possibilities.

To me, I feel the happiest when I surround myself with other people who are doing something — big or small — that feed their soul. It gives you that, ‘Hey, maybe I can do that, too!’ feeling. Finding out what nourishes you and then doing it is what makes life wonderful.

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If you’re anything like me, you have days when you want to shake things up and days when you just want things to stay the same. Luckily, we can usually have a little bit of both. This month, I’m so excited to shake up my own life by ending my hiatus from Sweden With Love. I took these past months off to hang out with my husband and our three little kids (Axel, 6, Gustav, 3 and Liv, 1). I learned to bake yummy sugar-free vegan chocolate chip cookies, searched endlessly for my kids’ missing gloves and read the complete Alexander McCall Smith’s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series for the second time. Family, food, books…a pretty great combination.

But I must admit, I really missed having a community to share ideas with, get inspired by and learn from. The main reason I fell in love with journalism when I first started out as a new college graduate at People magazine was how it suddenly opened up my world. It was such joy to pick the brains of people who lived their passion, whether that was an actor or a mountain lion rescuer. You know the rush you get when you’re doing something you truly love?

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