Today’s Daily Stoic writing prompt:  How can I conquer fear and worry–before they conquer me?

Before this past year, I always marveled at how people managed to cope during disasters, or under the rule of oppressive regimes, or during wartime.  And then, the double-whammy of a pandemic and an increasingly-authoritarian US government, I got the experience of “living in interesting times,” and I learned:  you find the things that feed your soul–no matter where you are–and focus on them as much as you can.  You stay informed and ready to deal with reality, but you live each day on its own with the recognition that the present is what you have right now–the future is uncertain.  What can I do today to live, to love those who I love, to fight the fights that are necessary to fight–and to walk away from those that are not?  How can I acknowledge the awful, but to let that acknowledgement power me into greater engagement with the parts of the world I can impact for the better?

****
Today I finished up the last touches on the work for the scribal competition.  I can’t post any of it, through, because it still needs to be judged, but I will once that is taken care of–which could be about a week.  It’s unlike any design I have ever done.  It’s also big.  Now I have to roll it up and mail it, but luckily I seem to have mailers.

Meanwhile, I’m having fun in a Shostakovich discord chat trading anecdotes about him and cats and cars (and identifying and ordering a book I don’t have), along with swapping cat pics of our own cats, and also enjoyed an excellent RPG session on the new platform (called Forge).  I’m definitely liking it.  I also had an idea for an interesting scribal project I might have a go at next weekend–I have Friday off as a vacation day (which is, as some folks may remember, an unofficial milestone I’ve declared during this “siege”) and then Monday as the Family Day holiday.   We are seeing some good progress with provincial numbers dropping (we’ve more than halved the new case count recently) but that still puts us with counts in the 1400-1800 range, and Doug Ford is getting itchy about “reopening the economy” again.  I really wish he could just stuff it for another month or so.  Sigh.  

Some things do not change, even in the face of a pandemic:  I’m not watching the Super Bowl.  

So, continuing down the geeky math rabbit hole I started:  Fibonaccis in the Mandelbrot set: