Years ago, I made a video with my friend about tea ceremonies. I was fascinated by his tea process, the way that he would strain the tea leaves over and over, creating a new “steep” each time. The hot water would run through the tea, extracting new textures, flavors, and colors until eventually the leaves too shriveled to produce anything worth tasting. At the time, we compared this process to friendship, and how different iterations or steeps could produce vastly different relationships and results.

I’m not sure where I first heard this idea or where it came from, but it really spoke to me. When I was a teacher, I used to tell my students that anger was an emotion, just like the all the rest. But in my 30’s, I’m realizing that it’s a little bit more dangerous than other emotions. With anger, it’s easy to hit a wall. To slam face first and then not be able to recover for a while.

To express stress about the overwhelming and sometimes scary world that we live in, there are a couple of phrases I’ve heard people use. One is it’s a jungle out there, which usually means that the world is too crazy to really understand, and we should resign ourselves to that fact. I’ve also heard the term it’s a circus, which is the same idea with a bit more chaos thrown in for good measure.

When my son was born, I had a mantra that I said to him every night before he went to sleep. It was stay curious. I think Steve Jobs said it once in a graduation speech. My hope was that he would grow up to be someone who questioned the world, who made predictions, and who solve problems driven by this intense curiosity. Looking back on it, I realize now that this mantra was less for him than it was for me.

This was a common phrase on Twitter about a decade ago when Twitter was at its prime. The conventional wisdom was that you won’t go viral, you won’t be re-tweeted, you won’t be shared… unless you ask for it. There were floods of tweets that ended with PLEASE RT promoting all sorts of things: ideas, music, stories, news articles… Another manifestation of this same disease is the common “Hit Like and Subscribe” when you watch a YouTube video.