February 2025 List

Silence, dropping phones, anger, curiosity, and those inner critics.

Feb 28, 2025

Image of wooden library catalogue cabinet.

This month I offer you a list for encouraging your ease and wellness.

1

Silence: Quiet, please! The remarkable power of silence – for our bodies and our minds by Sam Pyrah, The Guardian, February 2, 2025

I’m big on silence and solitude, as in big on it daily, and so this may be my favourite read this month.

I really want you to read it.

2

How to Break Up with Your Phone, by Catherine Price

No worries if you were too busy playing Donut County and missed breaking up with your phone back in 2018, you can still do it now.

Options galore, read the book or take a bite-size of it with:

How to Break Up with Your Phone, by Catherine Price, New York Times, 2018
7 Tips From Catherine Price's Book 'How To Break Up With Your Phone', By Frances Bridges, Forbes, 2019

And Catherine Price can be found still doing phone break-ups at How to Feel Alive with Catherine Price (just ran across it today, so don’t take this as a recommendation).

3

“I talk” and “I thought” for Anger: How to hold up a mirror to yourself by changing your use of language, by Donald Robertson

Yesterday, while waiting for a friend at a lunch spot frequented by the local downtown business community, I overheard, well pretty much everyone there overheard, “I am so angry because of her”. As the story loudly unfolded, it turns out that the “her” had “made” the story-teller angry by disagreeing with a partnership proposal at that morning’s executive team meeting (the things we spill in public spaces).

When my kids were little they learned the “I” practice as in “I feel angry when you eat my ice cream”. It seemed better than my childhood learning of “I can hit you when you eat my ice cream” or “you can hit me to take my ice cream”.

But in this article, Donald Robertson is upping the game with “I notice right now that I am angering myself by …”. Wow.

He writes:

Say this to yourself as soon as you notice the earliest warning signs of anger emerging. Make a mental note so that later you can write down your observations, and keep a daily record of the various ways in which you angered yourself in different situations.
First of all, this replaces “I am angry”, “he made me lose my temper”, “this situation makes me furious”, and similar thoughts, expressed grammatically in the passive voice, with “angering myself”, which is in the active voice. If you want to adopt a victim mentality, by disowning responsibility, use the passive voice. If you want to take responsibility for your own emotions, however, use the active voice. … In other words, it can help restore the agency that anger has taken away from you.

Emotional intelligence is foundational for wise and ethical leadership and we’d all benefit from upping our practice of awareness and care when anger arises.

4

Curiosity feeds my gratitude for the everyday stuff and and has the power (when I remember to tap into it) to shift the challenging, the boring, and even the distressing into something that is rich and meaningful.

To encourage your curiosity:

The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It by Lorraine Besser
Curiosity is a Key to Wellbeing, Psychology Today, January 2023
How Curiosity can Change your Life, Sophie Bonnaire Lafont , TEDxHSGSalon
Seek, by Scott Shigeoka (the website is fun to poke around in)

And don’t forget to play.

Adults may want to consider revisiting their childhood hobbies, according to a psychologist, CTV, February 23
How to Add More Play to Your Grown-Up Life, Even Now:
Play can feel silly, unproductive and time consuming. And that’s precisely the point, Kristin Wong, New York Times, 2020
A Golden Age of Play for Adults, Dave Neal, The British Psychological Society, March 2020

5

Extras

I had forgotten as to why George Eliot’s Middlemarch is considered one of the greatest British novels. We are all in it with our charms, foibles, distresses, joys, pride, courage, infatuations (of self and others), large and small mindedness, wise and foolish intentions - our being human. And there are so many snort out-loud passages. Here’s a quick one for you, "Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned," said Celia, regarding Mr. Casaubon's learning as a kind of damp which might in due time saturate a neighboring body.” SNORT!
I’m near completion of my “working with a client’s inner critic” certification and just as I’ve said before, those inner critics may have shown up for a perfectly good reason (childhood safety being the most common), but as far as sharing your space with them now, they are messy, destructive, dishonest and don’t pay rent. It’s time for them to go.
I was looking around for my next stationary bike riding show and ran across Spirited. I watched the first 10 minutes or so and thought “cliche” and switched it off. A few days later I went back and now I’m full on committed to the growing friendship between Suzy the gymnast dentist and Henry the dead punk rocker.
Listening to Sticky Notes. When the kids were little we’d go to the library for those classical music CDs like Beethoven Lives Upstairs and Mozart's Magic Fantasy. The kids continued their music appreciation into adulthood and one attends his city’s symphony regularly. A few years ago, I stumbled into watching Mozart in the Jungle (sort of a grown-up take on those kid CDs) and my curiosity about classical music was again piqued. I still can’t tell a Stravinsky from a Brahms (well maybe a little bit) but I’m no longer limited to “is this from Bugs Bunny?”.
Sea Otter Cam, Vancouver Aquarium. An argument for the good of the internet.