Gifts. . .
This Christmas, I bought myself a special gift, Brené Brown’s new book, Atlas of the Heart. It is a book that catalogs emotions (both traits and states) and gives a new level of precision to the language we use to express how we feel.
This Christmas, I bought myself a special gift, Brené Brown’s new book, Atlas of the Heart. It is a book that catalogs emotions (both traits and states) and gives a new level of precision to the language we use to express how we feel.
We humans love to think we’re “in control” – that we’re in charge of the universe and can manage everything in our path. It’s generally a healthy premise because, as researchers tell us, an internal locus of control (that sense of being powerful, having a say, exercising our agency) is empowering.
We do this to ourselves, you know! Our impossible wish for the picture-perfect holiday, our expectations of a dinner table worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting, the need to out-gift or over-gift because we haven’t seen family members for months, even years on end. It’s a lot.
The song was Big Yellow Taxi and Joni Mitchell recorded it in January of 1970 and it has stuck in my head like an earwig for fifty years. . .