I have a hero, a Union Army captain, Joshua Chamberlin, a professor on leave from Bowdoin College in Maine, who, while executing a textbook maneuver, saved the flank of the Union lines at Gettysburg, changed the outcome of the battle and maybe the war. He stretched his line as thinly as possible and hinged it inwardly on itself at a 90 degree angle. In military parlance, he re-fused the line. He rejoined it. And, while few of us will be captains of such a significant enterprise, we can be captains of our own little enterprise, captains of our selves, and do exactly what? We too can refuse the line, change the lines of our thinking. Every hour presents the opportunity to refuse the habitual way we respond to provocation, to the ill-chosen words of a friend or an inhospitable piece of furniture. We can think, choose before we move, and redirect our response. We can choose to live more largely, centrifugally if you will, rather then in the centripetal coiling of our ever more patterned lines of response. So, you can be a hero after all, and if not a Chamberlin, then a(n) (insert name here) , a new version of yourself TO yourself, to your friends, to your family,  your teachers and students. Just refuse the line. Ladies, you know all about this, don’t you?