A few Sundays ago, Keith came down with a wicked cough. The hacking preceded a stuffy nose followed by the voice beginning to crack.
I did my best to convince him to stay home at the offset of his symptoms so we could get ahead of what seemed to be an aggressive little bug. Every attempt at convincing him proved futile.
The first day, he went into the office and filled his poor little body with cold medicine and caffeine so he could stay awake. At the end of the day, he came home and crashed.
The next morning, my lobbying to persuade him to stay home again proved unmatched for his determination to fight this incoming illness mano y mano.
The first two days he went into the office would have been perfect days for him to stay home and allow me to take care of him as they were slower than usual days for me on the work front. But Wednesday would be a completely different story. That day’s schedule was jam packed.
I bet you can guess what happened next. You betcha!
Wednesday morning rolled around and as I was preparing for my busy work day to begin, I noticed Keith crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over his shoulders. Yep, you guessed it again…my day was about to be interrupted.
My first thought: “Nooooooooo….”
My second thought: “It’s so rare my hubby allows me to fully take care of him. He’s such a self-sufficient human being and at this moment I knew if he could do it on his own, he would have, so I kissed his forehead and assured him I’d cancel everything in my day to tend to his needs.
Was it an inconvenience? Yes. Did it quickly become my pleasure? Absolutely.
Here are the 3 quick tips I use to maintain my happiness when the craziness of life begins to threaten it:
1. Find something in that moment to be grateful for…immediately. In this instance, it was that my husband was alive and well and needed me to help him get better. I could have gotten frustrated that I’d tried to help earlier in the week, and had he listened to me, my day would not have been so inconvenienced. But really, how would that have helped?
2. Seek out the beauty in the situation. Every situation in life is meant to make us better as human beings. Life is but a series of tests and how we respond to those tests determines whether we pass and move on or are faced with the same challenge at a later date. Look for the lesson in every interruption. My lesson in this momentary interruption was patience.
3. Find a way to become a beacon of light. The world can be a dark and cold place to live. So many are looking for answers, even those around us. When we take the focus off ourselves and shift them onto helping another, in that instant our heart and life will radiate. Shifting my focus from the work I desperately needed to get done to taking care of someone in greater need allowed me to be a blessing to another individual. And in this case, that person just happened to be my favorite person in the world.
Question: How do you keep life’s interruptions from adversely impacting your happiness? (NEW: You can now leave comments on this page – just scroll down and click through the Comments button below)
Until tomorrow…make it a great day!
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