You Never Know

You never know. As we go through our day we never really know what other people are going through. The driver who cuts us off may be on the way to the hospital. The person who glares at us when we talk loud may have just fought with someone they love. Then again, they may just be jerks.

It does not matter, jerks or a bad day; it costs us nothing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They are part of our story for only a moment, but a smile or at the least the lack of our own glare may help make things better for them.

If we can’t let the small slights, the inconvenience of strangers go, all it does is serve to darken our day. We can work to make others' day better or we can reflect there sorrow to the world.

Time to Launch

Whenever we are working on a project that we do not have complete control over there comes the moment of launch. This is the moment when we have done our part and we have to fire it out into the world for others to see, to use or to react to.

The build up to the launch can be busy, hectic and seem stressful, but the stress of having to wait is even worse.

This can be one of the causes of procrastination. We will keep working, keep fine toning, keep trying to make sure each part is as good as we can make it just to avoid the stress of having to wait for a reaction.

Moving Clouds

As I sit in a coffee shop pounding out these words this morning I am watching a cold June rain splash down on a Northern California shopping center. The cars still roll through the parking lot but the people do not gather at the tables, they duck under awnings and they jog across the parking lot.

Yesterday was a warm if cloudy day, the day before that was bordering on hot. People moved slowly, they stopped they chatted, they lingered at the tables.

Like Northern California weather the weather of our personal landscapes can change quickly, summer to winter in the space of one night, one conversation, even seeing the wrong person can shift our mood. We may not be able to be meteorologists for ourselves but unlike weather we can do something about our moods.

We need to be able to recognize when these mood shifts occur and make sure that we are able to redirect our focus. In other words the incident that changes our mood is like a gust of wind blowing cold rain in from the north. The wind comes and goes but the cloud lingers.

We can take hold of the cloud and move it on. If a sudden bad mood is the rain cloud the things that are right in our life is the clear sunny sky. Moving the clouds, refocusing on the things that make us happy can bring them back.