Today was the day one of the nine Supreme Court Justices of the United States Supreme Court is visiting my school. Pretty freaking cool! Problem is, I came down with a gnarly cold on Tuesday. I ended up taking Wednesday off from work but I spent a fair bit of bandwidth worrying about what to do if I was not feeling great when I woke up this morning.

On the one hand I realized seeing Justice Jackson speak in person with my AP Gov students is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. On the other hand, I knew I didn’t want to get anyone sick and I certainly didn’t want to get any sicker. There’s also the fact that once we were are in the library, we couldn’t leave and come back because a live radio program was broadcasting the talk.

This morning, like I always do, I went into my ‘Stoic and Buddhist Wisdom” Notebook LM and asked it to give me some helpful reminders. Part of today’s response is below. The first bit of advice, specifically the part about irrational fears, landed perfectly because it spoke to the niggling worry I had all day yesterday about how things would turn out today. The bottom line, I was reminded, is that spending mental energy yesterday worrying about how today would play out was not wise. Both the Stoics and the Buddhists argued against getting caught up in worries about things beyond our control. Indeed, I felt better enough to go to school today so my worries about missing the opportunity were for naught. Had things gone the other way, that would’ve been alright, too.

My daily reminder protocol spits out simple advice, but it was very helpful to hear this morning.

More on the Justice Jackson visit in the coming days.