Happy Leap Day! Happens every four years, February 29th. An extra day. In my case today, it's an extra day to recover from bronchitis. Actually, probably to recover from a bug that affected me earlier in the month and, because I didn't take the time to fully recover before resuming my out and aboutness, morphed into bronchitis right when I had guests visiting from Canada for a week. Ugh. We actually had a very good visit. I had guilt feelings about being possibly contagious but as one of my guests is a nurse and she didn't order me into isolation or flee our house, I decided I would just focus on hostess duties. I did notice, however, she was always scrubbing behind me.... I now have a much cleaner house than I normally do :) I don't have any deep or pithy things to write today. I could write my dark thoughts about the current political situation in the world. My horror at social media, even while I still participate in it. My reflections on how I learn more from the
The title of this week's blog comes from the title of an article I read this week in The Atlantic. The author, Arthur C. Brooks writes a weekly column on "How to Build a Life". His articles are always worth thinking about. The subtitle of this one, whose three-word title might have been written by a certain nameless US presidential candidate about his numerous misdeeds, actually clarifies more about Brooks' theme for the article: Our fears about what other people think of us are overblown and rarely worth fretting over. Brooks describes where this fear originates--in many of us, it's an ancestral holdover from a time where it was imperative that we knew what people thought of us. It's also a holdover from a time where what people thought of us determined the grades we would achieve in school, the job we would obtain and whom we would marry. Those fears are not in Brooks' article though, they're my own musings. Brooks focuses on the other kind of fear,