A friend who believes stress being the cause of my hair falling out is just plain silly has come up with a plan to de-stress my life so that in a month, if my hair is still coming out in clumps, I can stand before the doctor and exude equanimity.

Each day, she texts me my de-stressing prescription. Just the texts alone are enough to make me smile. I have, however, made every attempt to follow them. The photo here being one of those endeavors.

The first ones are below:

• Take a look around outside and find something that will make me laugh out loud.
• Grab some crayons or markers and spend 10 minutes drawing like a child.
• For each letter of my name, write something that is positive about my life.
• Stop and smell some flowers (not the roses in my yard).
• Take my shoes off and skip in the grass like a child.

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I have been wrestling with what it means to forgive of late. Tonight, I read two apologies by fellow commenters on Four and Twenty+ Blackbirds. Each was sincerely sorry for offending/hurting the other; each begged for forgiveness. Grown men writing such. Grown men writing such in a very public forum. In my opinion, this lesson was as great, if not greater, as the message of the post on which they were commenting.