#Enjoythelittlethings

Haley Holland, recent BHS graduate, wrote in her senior metaphor, "I am the Kansas weather." Well, I would like to springboard off of her sentiment and apply her metaphor to myself and my writing. It seems that I have chosen to do all of my writing in one week in May in flood of sound and fury. Thanks Haley.

I have to credit Samantha Neill, Greg Freose, and Andrew Bauer for seeding this thunderstorm of words. Blog, baby, blog.

The trigger that compelled me to turn out a third post this week was breakfast. It is, afterall, the most important meal of the day. This morning, I chose to step out to the patio to take my morning sustenance, consisting of leftover potatoes, peppers and sausage coupled with eggs. I felt moved to post a picture of the scene, with #enjoythelittlethings attached, even though I have a strong aversion to tweeting food pictures. Snapchat is a different story, but we do not need to get into that right now.  The moment on the patio this morning with my breakfast and coffee, with the cloudy skies and calm breeze, was a truly pleasant moment. It was not monumental, nor was it overly productive.  However, it was peaceful, and it was immensely calming. It was a little thing.

A while back, I posted about the rules of Zombieland, one of which is "Enjoy the little things." I discussed going to Kwik Shop or getting a pop. Little things are often what make our lives to most enjoyable, meaningful, or memorable. Little things are sometimes what make our lives endurable, survivable, or sustainable. They might be the meat in the dish at dinner, or they might be the spice that makes the dish enticing and appealing. Little things. Think about about. It might be a gentle hand on your shoulder when you are frustrated, a soft kiss when you are leaving for work, a furry nuzzle when you lay down after an exhausting day, a walk to the corner store when you need the world to slow down a bit, or the repeated retelling of a joke about wearing jeans to a costume party when you are in the middle of a monotonous afternoon of work.

So, I am setting up another challenge for myself. I challenged myself when I started blogging to write at least once a week, and I have not completely lived up to that challenge. It has forced me to write much more than I used to thoughtfully put words down on paper or in print, as have the admonishments from my colleagues when I fail to write, so that challenge has been a success to some degree, and I will continue to try to meet that self-imposed standard. This next challenge might help me do that. This challenge is to consciously recognize and enjoy the little things. It is far too easy to let the little things slide by or tumble past leaving you with nearly nothing positive in your mental ledger at the end of the day, instead of gathering them up, piling the tiniest tidbits into bushel baskets of positivity to sift through at sunset.

That is my hope anyway. Feel free to take up the challenge yourself. It can't hurt, right? And as Bluto once said, "It don't cost nothin'."