I watched a video recently by a motivational speaker. His topic was happiness, and he challenged the idea that being successful will make us happy, contending instead that being happy will make us successful. At the end he listed four simple things we can do to promote our own happiness, and one of them stood out to me as the answer to a prayer: keep a journal, and write about one positive thing that happens to you every day.
I used to be a journal-keeping fool. As a teenager becoming a young-adult, it was how I worked through things, and often how I got to enjoy the best of those things again and again. Somewhere along my way, I began to over-think my writing, and I lost the ability to just write. Since I began Scenes from a Snow Globe, I’ve been looking for ways to give it boundaries, because it seems the most successful bloggers have a theme, and because I went to college and in my writing classes I slowly accepted the idea that you must “narrow your topic!”
I know I want to capture the everyday, ordinary-extraordinary moments of small town life, but still I struggle to let my thoughts flow; I tend to want to assign too much meaning to the entries, to over-stuff them with emotion instead of letting them speak for themselves. What I realized when the speaker suggested his journal idea, was that the moments I really want to remember are the ones that make me slow down and smile. If there are moments of pain or anger or melancholy, I want to balance them, surround them, wrap them up in beauty. It’s exactly those happy things floating around, lingering in the air, that can make my world a snow globe in the first place. So today I begin again, Scenes from a Snowglobe…
February 26, 2012
I love people! I’m a people-watcher, a kind-spirited eaves-dropper. People amuse me, amaze me, make me think. In my mind, I give out high-fives and hugs to strangers all the time. But what I don’t do is actually talk to or touch people. My husband is my hero in that regard. He’s a talker-toucher. He holds doors, makes jokes, gives out compliments. While I hear and see more little details about the people all around me than he does, he interacts with the people right in front of him far better than I. So I’m trying to learn from him, and today my efforts paid off by giving me my “one positive thing” to journal.
In line in front of me at the grocery store today was an elderly man all alone. I shop in a big warehouse style store where you bag your own groceries. He was getting out money to pay the cashier in that slow and careful way the elderly do things, with a patient determination to do the things that they’ve done with ease for many years, but which now present a challenge for them. Everything from his baseball cap to his worn and tidy wallet reminded me of the years when taking my grandpa shopping was a regular part of my life. I could imagine him changing from denim overalls to his “waist pants,” like my grandpa used to do when we “went to town.”
Normally that would be all there was to it. I would notice those little details and I would get a nice memory and a smile out of them. But today, while he was slowly paying, I quickly bagged his groceries, which meant I was going to have to explain myself to him in a real, live interaction. So when he looked up, I placed his bags in his cart and said, in what I hoped was a bright and cheerful voice, “I got them for you.”
“Well, I’ll give you a hug for that!” he glowed, as he proceeded to do just that. For one quick, warm moment in the grocery store, I got so much more than just a smile, I got my grandpa back.
