Happy Thanksgiving to my USAmerican readers. I did have a pretty long and involved post I was working on for today, but let’s face it, you’re just going to be stuffing your faces full of turkey and cranberry sauce. Better to save that long and involved post for another day.

Also, there have been plenty of serious posts lately. Today, I just want to share something which is brief and fun.

In the course of my internet wanderings, I came across an interesting new service. It’s called Emotional Bag Check. The basic premise is that you decide whether you want to anonymously unload you’re own emotional baggage, or whether you want to help carry someone else’s.

If you choose to carry someone else’s, you’ll be presented with a short prompt that describes a person’s problem, and then you choose a song for them which you think will help them with their problem. You have the option of including a short note of encouragement, and then you send off your song anonymously.

If you’re on the receiving end, you describe the problem you’re having, and then you wait for an anonymous song suggestion and hopefully a few words of encouragement in return.

It’s such a simple concept, but it’s super powerful.

When you find yourself struggling with your fears or anxieties, sometimes all you need is a few words of encouragement. Try posting  your issue to Emotional Bag Check and see what kind of response you get.

It can be just as encouraging to help someone else with their problem though, if not more so. When we help someone else with their fears and anxieties, we realize how easy it is to blow things out of proportion, and how simple the solutions to our problems are. Surely if we can find a way to help out a stranger, then we can find a way to help out ourselves.

Life is not as scary as we make it out to be. Our brains play tricks on us. Neat tools like Emotional Bag Check can help us keep anxieties in check. And failing that, it’s a least a fun way to share that silly Beatards song.

In more general news, you might notice some bug fixes and general sprucing up of things. I worked on the comments section pretty extensively, and it’s a little bit less of an eyesore now. I’ve also started cultivating what I call the Unfear Ethos. You can check it out in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page. In one sentence, the content at Tao of Unfear is uncopyrighted, advertising-free, lovingly handcrafted, and accessible to search engines–if you leave a comment with a link back to your website, search engines will crawl it.

That’s all for today. Have a good holiday, and I’ll see you back here on Tuesday.

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