Recently, on a sleepy Sunday morning, my husband sat in his
recliner flipping through the television channels and I sat on my own recliner
in the opposite corner of the room. I
had my laptop on my lap and was working on a Jigzone.com puzzle. I looked up just as he was zooming past the
OWN network and Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday was on the air. I didn’t know the speaker but I yelled, “Hang
on! Slow down!” He did slow down – not long
enough for me to find out who the speaker was – but long enough for me to get
the gist of her message. She related a
story of looking for something joyful and not going home until she found
it. She found happiness on one
particular day in the form of elephants.
That’s all that I caught before my husband grabbed the remote and
clicked away.
Although I didn’t hear the entire message, I decided to put
that thought into practice. I was not
going to go home today until day one of my experiment with gratitude was done.
I went to the grocery store today. I hate the grocery store. The produce isn’t always fresh. The prices are too high. The cashiers are grumpy. I looked for items on my shopping list that
the cooking channel assured me could be found at my local grocer. They could not. I wasn’t feeling warm and fuzzy. I could have changed my attitude on any of
the above to find my gratitude but…… well, let me remind you that I’m not
always good at this gratitude attitude.
I was determined to find smiles in the faces of
strangers. I went through the aisles,
glancing but not making eye contact with the other shoppers. I was going to catch someone smiling. That would satisfy my experiment.
Nobody was smiling.
Then, I became obsessed.
It became a science project to get them to smile. ‘Darn It!
They will smile and they will like it!
Darn It!’ I laughed at my own
determination and you know what?? When I smiled, someone smiled back at
me. So I smiled at another, and was
smiled at again. Every smile that I
showed was reciprocated. The grumpy
cashier even added a “Have a good day” with her smile.
A smile is one of those things that you can give and still
keep. For that, I’m grateful.
