Your Fearful Leader

I like to tell my kids the thing about how being brave doesn't mean that you're not afraid of something. Being brave is about being scared...but doing the thing anyway.

Things are progressing with the neighborhood group and the associated neighborhood garage sale. I and a few helpers put about 250 flyers into and onto and around mailboxes last week, telling everyone about both the group and the sale. The group is now up to almost 25 members (hey! that's, like, 10%!) and I think 16 people have signed up to participate in the sale, and it sounds like more are planning to, but haven't signed up yet. Which is all really exciting!

Passing out flyers was a little wonderful and a little horrible. The weather, most of the times we were out, was gorgeous. When I was with my gregarious friend, L, she talked to everyone who was out in their yards and met new people and got people excited about the group and the sale. When it was just me or me and Dr. Jay, we would nudge each other, "Hey, go talk to that person!" "No, you go talk to them."

I worried that the flyers would blow away and everyone would be mad at me for messing up the neighborhood. I worried that the mail carrier would give us a ticket for putting things in mailboxes. I worried that people would think I was selling something. I imagined that people would think I was a young hippie mom, dragging my kids around to get paid a few dollars by some stupid company  trying to sell them something they didn't want. I imagined that a lot. (Not that I have anything against young hippie moms. I just have a terror of being misunderstood or misread or misjudged. Which is a story for another post...maybe.)

But I got through, and at the end, I felt like I knew the neighborhood better, even the parts I never go to because they're not on my way anywhere. And the few people I talked to were very nice. And then people started signing up, little by little.

In A Short History of Nearly Everything, one of my absolute favorite books, which I keep listening to over and over on audiobook, Bill Bryson talks about Max Planck, and how he learned, after doing much work on entropy, that someone else had already done the same work but published it in an obscure source. After describing this, the next paragraph starts: "Undaunted--well, perhaps mildly daunted--Planck turned to other matters."

I have been daunted by this neighborhood group project. But I have to remember that many people eventually succeed with something, despite being daunted along the way. But they keep going, and then, someday, someone looks back and says they continued, undaunted.