Refresher courses

Dusk, 8 p.m. and the sky is fluttering with the wings of insects that have hatched on a nearly fall day when the temperatures were in the 80s.
I watched from the deck, the setting sun, the buzz of bugs.
Lips pursed, a knot of tension in my upper back.

It's time, I think, for another read of Laurence Gonzales' "Deep Survival."
Just, you know, to relieve my head from my ass. A couple of underlined points from the battered copy of my trade paperback:

"Stress causes most people to focus narrowly on the thing that they consider most important, and it may be the wrong thing."

"I could not change the world; I could only change myself. To see and know that world then, was the key to surviving it. I had to accept the world in which I found myself. I had to calm down and begin living."