Reaching For Joy
I’ll be honest, the past couple of days, I have had an arguably short temper. I have been getting frustrated slightly more easily than usual – yesterday specifically, some stuff happened that led to a transition to bed time that had me on my phone right until I went to bed, which I don’t like doing. As a result, I didn’t sleep well (my cat deciding to have the 12 AM ‘zoomies’ didn’t help either). So I woke up this morning feeling tired still and with a bit of a headache. So then I was tired most of the day and then when Eric and I went to work out, I was short tempered with him and etc, etc, etc… the cycle can continue – if I let it! I want to break – nay, karate chop – the cycle and cultivate happiness! I even wore my ‘choose joy’ shirt this morning because I know I would need it today. In honor of that, I’m going to share some stories/experiences from my life that still make me chuckle or smile. Read on to find out how interesting my life is!
- I call this one: trapped in a squad car. My mom is a state trooper and her squad car lived in our garage growing up. When I was about 12 or 13, one day my sister and I decided to go for a bike ride. Our bikes lived in the garage attic – in order to get them, we had to open the garage door to have space behind my mom’s car (the door was in the middle of the two-car garage). We didn’t want to open the garage door so we decided to sneak through the back seat of the squad car to get to the other side. So we slid in and as I was closing the door, my sister yelled “wait!”, but it was two late. If you are not aware, squad cars lock from the inside so you can only get out if someone lets you out. So we were stuck there for I’m guessing somewhere between an hour and two – this was before we carried our cellphones with us so we were hopeless. The only reason my mom came out to look for us was because American Idol was about to start and she knew we wouldn’t want to miss it.
- Next up: the time we got chased by seals. If you have read my post from the other day, you know that Eric and I built a trailer camper. We basically built the majority of it in a week then took it on a 1,000+ mile road trip to Maine without ever test driving it. When we got to Maine, we were able to go paddleboarding in Casco Bay – thanks to my employment as a paddleboarding instructor with L.L. Bean. The people we talked to before going out advised us to make sure to give the seals distance. Well, we must have gotten too close to the rock they were perched on, because they started chasing us. If you have never paddled away from seals chasing you, you have never truly paddled, am i right?! Add to that the fact that we had seen tons of jellyfish in the water so we were terrified of falling in for that reason and you have a recipe for sore shoulders the next day! But alas, we lived to tell the tale.
- One more – this is one of my grandma’s favorite stories. The last Easter of hiding real eggs. We used to use real eggs for our Easter egg hunts at my grandma’s growing up. One year, my grandma hid the eggs in the backyard and we found them all and wanted to hide them for her. My sister and I decided that we should bury one really close to the trunk of a tree. My grandma was able to find all the eggs, but one and we either had forgotten about the last buried one or went inside or something that kept us from retrieving it at the time. So a couple of days went by and my grandma was in the backyard gardening and smelled the rotten egg. As she was looking for the source of the smell, she ended up stepping on it and oozing multiple-day-old egg all over her shoe and the ground around her. She had a good laugh about it and decided that starting to following year, we would hide fake eggs.
If you made it through, thank you for humoring me – I needed to reflect on and share some of my favorite stories to cultivate some joy this evening. I may need to cultivate more with some ice cream to be honest, but I have to convince Eric of the importance of ice cream to my overall health first. Hopefully it won’t be too hard – after all, today was leg day! Cheers to Friday tomorrow!
