;)
I’m “cleaning off my desk” at home today—paying bills and sorting through disheveled piles of sundry papers that seem to thrive and multiply there—and as usually happens, I’ve come across many that, for reasons that now escape me, I failed to expediently dispatch.
One is a direct mail advertisement from a CPA firm. Now, I’ve used the same CPA for more than thirty years, so why, I ask myself, is the solicitation gathering dust on my desk? Another is a letter from my home mortgage company announcing, as though I’ve just won the lottery, that I’m “eligible to apply” for refinancing. The letters arrive so frequently that I’ve learned to recognize their envelopes. So why did I toss this one on my desk instead of into the circular file?
The one I’m looking at now is a ragged page torn from a magazine I don’t even recognize. Maybe Dawn clipped it for me to read. On one side is a full page ad for a beauty product that “lifts away years while you sleep”. I know that isn’t what caught my attention; I want to keep all the years I can! On the other side is a short article about the music preferences of composer Danny Elfman—Billy Holiday, Goran Bregovie—and I can’t imagine that would have interested me.
Hmmmm. At the bottom of the page is a link to myngle.com, an interactive site offering online foreign language instruction. Maybe that’s it; I’ve often considered brushing up on my high school Spanish. Or maybe, just maybe, it was this profound excerpt from The Personal Credibility Factor by Sandy Allgeier:
“Highly credible people make decisions to ‘suspend judgment’ when considering another person’s perspective. They do this because they are okay with being wrong - or, at bare minimum, okay with having their opinions challenged. This doesn’t mean they don’t have passion and strong beliefs. It simply means that their minds are open to other opinions, even if those are quite different from their own.”
Yeah, that must be it! I probably wanted to check out the book. Mystery solved.
Now, why do you suppose I’m holding on to this expired offer from Hallmark for a $5 stuffed panda if I buy three cards before December 24…?