Dear #Positivity Friends,

Long before March Madness was working us up into a hoops frenzy every year, we just had spring fever, an amorphous condition that begins appearing right about now and continues until spring comes to an end. The longer periods of daylight the season brings trigger the “symptoms” of spring fever—feelings ranging from a thrum of restlessness to a happy buzz of energy to a daydreaminess that can lead to bursts of creativity or even new love.

It makes sense. Finally free from the stifling darkness of winter, of course we’re just itching to feel the sun on our faces. Hit with a bad case of the fever, however, we might find ourselves acting like the excitable March hare, who can’t help getting into boxing scuffles with the other hares or jumping straight in the air for no reason. Poor guy!

Mark Twain’s rascally Tom Sawyer said it best: “It’s spring fever…you don’t quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!” Let’s get out there and feel that fever this month—eat a triple-scoop ice cream cone or climb a tree or hit some Wiffle balls into the neighbor’s backyard. Because it feels good to be alive, doesn’t it?

As always, I hope that you are enjoying my newsletter. If you miss any edition, you can find it on my website. Pass this newsletter along and encourage your family and friends to sign up.

With hope and positivity,

With the native bee population in Australia on the decline, 23-year-old ecologist Clancy Lester, aka the “Bee Man,” has taken to traveling around the country setting up “bee hotels” and educating the locals about the importance of bees. He builds these habitats out of bamboo reeds and hardwood to simulate the natural environment in which bees and other insects nest. He also posts Instagram videos providing instructions for anyone who wants to build a bee hotel themselves as well as advice on planting native species to help the bee population thrive. That’s a beeautiful thing.

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki

It can be hard not to be cynical living in a world that gives you more reasons every day to feel like you can’t trust, well, anything. Unfortunately, succumbing to a cynical outlook not only makes you feel worse, it makes the societal problems that are eating at you worse, too, according to Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki. When we expect the worst of things, they generally happen. The antidote to this self-perpetuating downward spiral is what Zaki calls “hopeful skepticism,” a positive, practical way to recalibrate the way we think about human nature so we can see a path to the future we hope for. Let’s give this a try, shall we?