Water and Worry

Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.--Arthur Somers Roche

I love this quote...especially today when I am so sick of rain and have spent the evening dealing with water in my basement and all the worrying that comes along with it. I am going to try not to encourage this particular worry that my whole house is going to fall in upon itself as I sleep...Speaking of sleep, I hope no one that cares about this blog is awake right now to read it. If you are, I'm going to take a little liberty with another mom moment and tell you to get some sleep...My mom would be telling me the same thing if she were here and saw how little shut-eye I have actually been getting over the last couple weeks.

As I perused several of your blogs tonight, I started getting this tense feeling because I could feel all of the pressure you were putting on yourselves to make sure that you turn in the most perfect paper you have ever written. While that would be wonderful for both of us, my wish for you is that YOUR best would be just as good as THE best. All I ask is that you do your best. That's it. Plain and simple.

And let me clarify something...I gave a lot of papers back last year - with a lot of corrective feedback. However, please know that there were only MAYBE four people in the whole class that had extensive rewrites to do. Last year we didn't have peer review time in class, we didn't have a little get together to talk about the papers, and they didn't have this fabulous blog to read - If we had, I doubt that those four people would have had to do some major work on their papers. My point is this - the thing that is most likely to happen is that you have some corrections to make on your paper. Nothing that will take long...nothing that will require you to rewrite entire pages or sections...maybe a sentence here, a little formatting there...you get the idea.

Ask yourself if you have done your best...If you have, take a few deep breaths and relax. It's a safe place to learn and a few corrections won't be the end of the world. If you haven't done your best, then I suggest you take those same deep breaths before kicking it in to gear.

And for now...for heaven's sake don't be worrying about the frameworks! You have a whole week to work on that after Thursday, and it will take you about 1/10 of the time it has taken you to do your lit review...

That's it for now...I have taken my deep breaths, have you? We don't want those little streams of worry to be cutting channels in your minds!!