valeriesbookofme

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,

A few years ago I had a planner, Panda Planner, that was aligned with something called Via Institute on Character. I am (almost) always up for filling out questionnaires that relate to who I am, my talents, weaknesses, etc., and Via had such a questionnaire--Finding Out Your 6 Strengths. Long and short of it, I filled it out and I discovered I had six strengths although, as I read all the things that each were about, I would have said they were more six tendencies than strengths because I am still working on them three years later.  Via presented the results in terms of a "meaning wheel". I often forget to review it but as I am in January, taking stock of where I'm going and all, I share these six, ummm, reminders?, that I am using to take stock of my life on a weekly basis: Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence, Curiosity, Social Intelligence, Perspective, Gratitude and Spirituality. I suppose that, based on my answers to the questionnaire, these were the top aspects tha

  I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most