Forget about it.

While it’s an iconic movie line to most, it’s actually great advice to yourself just about every day. Fuggedaboutit!

Basically, control what you can, and stop worrying about the rest. All it’s doing is causing massive internal agony that is just being placed on the really important stuff. It’s why people have heart attacks at a heart age, or find their skin and hair weathered and gray. Most of the things that we stress about are attached to matters out of our control.

What is the President saying now?

Who Cares? It’s out of your control. Do you think any leader is going to check with a single person before they do something? NOPE! They do what they do, so should you. It’s not that you shouldn’t wonder what the executive in chief is saying about another country’s leader, but don’t let it crawl inside your head for a concert. Read it, download it, and accept it. And then get back to your day.

Let me also announce that this is no easy task. It’s fun, at least temporarily, to get worked up over someone else’s shit. That surge of carelessness seeps into your natural opinion formulation, and it’s off to the races for a legendary rant that no one but your pets get to hear. It’s like getting worked up over a team of highly paid professional athletes; if you do all the math, the ulcer isn’t worth it. But people seek their teeth into the Dallas Cowboys on a yearly basis. Cardinal Nation is undefeated in loyalty points. It’s what it is.

But sports provide a sublime payoff more days than not. Your team doesn’t have to win a championship in order to provide a truck load of payoffs. Any sports fan will tell you why, so I’ll get back to my original point.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. 2020 has only enhanced that mindset. While this philosophy has spent many years with me, a particular tweet from a longtime follow reignited this ideal. Check it out.

There’s a whole thread there for you to read, but the message is simple. Worry about what you can control. The above tweet was most likely constructed as a result of photos of a bar in St. Charles County showing people crowding around with no masks or social distancing being practiced. I chimed in on the photos, because that’s just what I do.

But as I thought about what @Bluenatics wrote and how that practice lined up snugly with my own general belief of “take care of your own and eyes forward.” I felt like what I said-something about hospitals being at capacity and how this isn’t a good look-was unnecessary. Frankly, if these people want to live dangerously during a pandemic, let them steer their own ship. It’s their life, and it’s now or never. Bon Jovi was right: we will not live forever.

So every day I get up, there’s a reminder to clear out the mechanism. You’re not doing it for them. It’s being done for your sanity and health. Do it for a day and see how it feels. While the effects won’t equal a hit off a joint, they will feel pretty good.

At the end of this rope will be someone asking us if we were accountable, or did we spend all our time staring at other people’s lives? A tough question for some-but definitely not for me.

Worry about you and yours. Forget the rest.

–@buffa82