Musings
TUESDAY: PREPARE FOR NEGATIVITY
By Sue Pascoe · May 5, 2025
A reader sent a week of thoughts he had been sent and CTN is printing one a day.
“When you first rise in the morning tell yourself: I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous, and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don’t know the difference between good and evil. Because I have understood the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, I know that these wrong-doers are still akin to me … and that none can do me harm or implicate me in ugliness—nor can I be angry at my relatives or hate them. For we are made for cooperation.” — Marcus Aurelius
You can be certain as clockwork that at some point today you’re going to interact with someone who seems like a jerk (as we all do). The question is: Are you going to be ready for it?
This exercise calls to mind a joke from the 18th century writer Nicolas Chamfort, who remarked that if you “swallow a toad every morning,” you’ll be fortified against any other disgusting thing that might happen that day.
But there is a second part to this, just as there is a second half of Marcus’ quote: “No one can implicate me in ugliness—nor can I be angry at my relative or hate him.” The point is because you’ve prepared for it, you’ll be able to act with patience, forgiveness, and understanding.
LANDSCAPING
A resident responded to the question “why wouldn’t people in standing homes have their gardeners back to keep up their properties?”
“Many of us in standing homes have nothing to landscape,” the resident wrote. “People don’t realize how many of us in ‘standing homes’ are actually dealing with ‘damaged homes’ and ‘uninhabitable homes’ and ‘lead-contaminated homes.’ We were not eligible for Army Corps clearance of all the debris and ash and char and burned trees and fences on our properties [editor’s note, FYI Corps doesn’t remove fences, driveways or trees that are not in the ash footprint in destroyed homes] – so we’re still in the long and exhausting process of fighting with insurance companies to pay for that cleanup. [Editor’s note: know you’re not alone, many of us whose homes are gone are fighting with insurance companies to receive money, too.]
The resident continued, “Please understand: many of us in standing homes are a long way away from having yards/properties that even have anything to maintain in them. Your perspective is part of a larger problem involving misconceptions about the reality those in ‘standing homes’ are facing.”
Sue Pascoe
Editor, Circling The News ·
circlingthenews.com