This is a story from the book Bring Gratitude. I wanted to share it because I feel like I'm having deja vu today. I wanted to turn my sour mood around and this is a perfect story to share with you.
It was a bleak day.
Rainy.
Regular.
Everything felt ho hum. Very normal.
The travel bug grabbed me and started thrashing me around. I felt desperate for adventure. I looked at flights and hotel rooms on my phone during lunch. Every place I wanted to go was very expensive.
We couldn’t afford it.
I went to work the next day with a sour attitude. I didn’t feel like being there.
As I was walking into work, I stumbled and dropped my thermos. The metal clanked on the ground. CLANK, CLANK, CLANK. It echoed around the office.
My coffee didn’t spill because of the great thermos my wife bought me.
Instead of picking it up and pretending like I never dropped it, I just stood over it for a second to soak in the moment. That clank was a noise I hadn’t heard in a while. I felt a little embarrassed, but not so much I felt like hiding. I took this time to learn from the situation.
I didn’t need to travel to have a new experience. I just needed to appreciate and enjoy what I could experience. So, I went into work looking to have conversations with new people. I talked with a guy at work who’d written a book on fine dining restaurants. I hadn’t even known he was an author.
He told me about a few restaurants to try out. I told my wife that we were going to have a sitter watch the kids on Saturday while we went out to a nice restaurant he’d recommended.
My sour attitude had changed into an interested one. I ordered the half chicken on top of seasoned veggies and was blown away by how good it was.
It made my week.
Have you felt grumpy this week? What is one small thing you can do to turn it around?
