Writing a blog has made me bolder. I’m basically a shy person, sometimes painfully so. For example, even after decades, I still get nervous speaking in departmental faculty meetings, unlike many colleagues who will drone on for tens of minutes about the controversial placement of a comma in a new department policy document…. Wait! Stop! Did I just write that?? Slap self hard! Or take Toilet Tissue Purchasing as another example. For some reason I get SO embarrassed buying it. I can’t look the checkout clerk directly in the eyes. I tried buying a single roll at a time for a while because I could hide it in the shopping cart between the rutabaga and the large bag of epsom salts. But all that shopping got old in a hurry. So now I just buy the small, anemic-looking four-pack. At midnight. DO NOT even suggest to me those super twenty-four roll jumbo packages or the insanely large mega-rolls. Everybody would be staring. Wait! Stop! That’s not really shyness, is it? It’s mental.
Anyway, recently I was minding my own business, walking through a hotel lobby restaurant in Orlando, when out of the corner of my left eye (my good one), I saw some pirates at a table. A decision had to be made: either keep walking and embrace a worldview which accepts pirates–or go ahoy them and take their picture for my blog.
Talk about friendly pirates! I didn’t fear for my life a single moment during our little connection time. Come to find out, they were a pirate family. Here’s mom and dad. Married 50 years!
And here’s their daughter, a very happy family practice doc, as well as a pirate!
They were joyful mates to meet.
That’s really cool! Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone and you can be pleasantly surprised by what you find.