It is not news to anyone reading this: working in a library is hard. Doing any kind of public-facing customer service work is always hard, and right now a lot of things are coming together to make it more complicated.

We can’t fix that for you. Sorry.

But this semester, we are going to provide small weekly stress-management/happiness builder ideas. They aren’t going to make all your issues magically solve themselves. But, everyone can use a reminder to take a step back and breathe.

When I talk about information literacy in the news, I always like to say that a million things happened today. Only a couple of them get picked up by the news and shared – because they are the unusual things. Most of life is people chugging through their days, things are going fine, no car wrecks, no fires, no invaders from another dimension. It was just…basic stuff that happened. The usual stuff in our lives.

What we see on the news is the weird, usually bad, things that happened. But that is the outlier. Most of those million things that happened today were neutral or even good things! Nobody is lying to us, it’s just a perspective. They get rewarded by our shock and upset feelings. Fine. Just keep in in perspective: that’s the weird stuff. It takes some reminders, but actively work to not let that overtake all the good things that also happened.

This week, we are suggesting you take a moment tonight to do a little writing. Use a pen and paper, type it into your calendar app – anything is fine. Whatever method you choose, take a minute or two to write down one or two (or three!) good things that happened to to you today, or good things you saw. It’s more of a struggle some days than others; but those days when you had so many things you can barely get them recorded will be great! And on the harder days, it’s really nice to look back at your list of all the nice things. It helps to keep a better perspective on life when you focus on this stuff.

Action For The Week: each evening, write down one or two good things.