When it feels like Cheerfulness is not an option, What then?

When it feels like Cheerfulness is not an option,  What then?

My Motto is  “Life is a Choice,  Choose Cheerful,  Live Happy”

But what about those days when it feels like cheerfulness is too far away to be a choice?  What about those days when the sadness just coats your soul like heavy cream on a wooden spoon?   Those days when all the sad things of your life rise to the top of your memory and just float there, refusing to be reincorporated back into their spots of long ago.   I recently had a couple of those days.   Too many things aligned and like the ancient monsters of Greek lore, escaped their prison and surfaced to show their faces.  It was a flood of sad days and sad things that had happened.  Sad Goodbyes,  Sad faces,  Sad greetings,  Even Sad food.   What about THOSE Days?

          Even Those days,  Especially Those days, you have to get up and get out of bed and shower and get dressed, and show up to your life,  Even if you think there will be nothing worth smiling about,  Those days matter most.  

When building a godlike countenance,  some things are easy.  Being nice to nice people,  being happy during a happy time,  living by the rules when the rules make sense and you see happiness because of righteousness, are all things most of us can do with a fairly small amount of effort.  But we are not asked to do the easy,  we are asked to do the Godlike.  Be nice to people who are rude and thoughtless or worse mean and hateful and unkind.   We are asked to see the joy in all things,  the sunshine and the storm,  the sweet and the sour, the joyful and the sorrowful.  We are required to live all God’s commandments,  the Thou shalt not and the Thou Shalt.  Don’t kill people, but also love people who are rude to you in the shopping line.  Smile at that small child and that big guy who just cut you off in traffic.  Pray for that worker who didn’t care to do his job, thereby making your life more complicated.  All those things that make you want to scream.  THOSE  DAYS !

Those are the days, when it is the hardest that we must not give up.  Those are the days when we are closer to our goal then we realize. 

I watched a little person many years ago try to learn a new skill.  One that I will admit is hard for most people to learn.  His little fingers did not want to work the way he wanted them to.  He tried and tried to get them to work together to make the music he could hear in his head.  But time after time a finger would betray him and the sound would fail.   Finally,  sad and discouraged he said he just couldn’t do it and would have to give up.  What he didn’t know what that I could see that he was almost there  just a few more tries and he would have it.  He wasn’t as far away as he thought.   And so  I encouraged him to try one last time.   HOORAY  Success.   His smile could have lit the entire coastline.   He was so proud of himself and then he said something I have never forgotten.

Well, he said,  I guess I was just one try off.

We are all just one try off.  We are all just around the corner from our destination.  Does that make that last try an easier?  NO.  But it does make it worth trying.   And if you are two more tries or three or more,   Keep trying.   On those days when I just want to go back to bed and hide,  I remind myself that perhaps today is the day I will be able to keep my tongue in check and not offend,  Perhaps today is the day I will have patience all day,  or  find joy in that stranger who is also having a day like mine and thinks I should pay for his day.   Perhaps today will be the day when Joy finds me and lifts me up to a more cheerful state of being.   Perhaps today  Someone else will help me find Joy in the Journey.

So on those days, phone a friend. Grab a lifeline and hang on until help comes.  Because, really,  that is why we all keep trying, because today, just maybe,  you will be the joy in someone’s day that keeps them going.  Today,  when you feel like you just can’t,  Be  the answer to someone’s prayer for just a bit of joy.