Find Your Inner Smile

When was the last time you found yourself smiling on the inside? What I mean is when have you last found yourself joyful in the simplest moment? Late last week I found myself having two truly joyful moments in what were the most simplest of situations.

A new friend of mine is really into roller skating, because she was on a derby team, so a few of us went to a local rink with her as she enjoyed one of her hobbies she hadn’t been able to do for a while. I wasn’t the most ecstatic about going, but still willing to, even though I’m not that great of a skater, never learned how to appropriately stop on quad skates, and hadn’t skated in a few years. As I skated around that rink and got the feel of things once again, I found myself  at one point happy doing this activity I hadn’t done since like being a pre-teen. I was happy to be doing something so simple, in terms of my extent of skating, that I remembered it is the simple activities in life that can make us happy on the outside. Not to say I didn’t fall, which I was told looked like I was in The Matrix dodging bullets, but even when I fell, it was a funny and pleasurable moment.  An external smile can be misleading but in during this time I found myself internally smiling at once again doing something I had not done in years. Every so often we need to look back into our pasts and do things that we think we may not enjoy again.

The following night another friend invited me out to Steak ‘n Shake to just talk and hang out. We ended up both getting root beer floats and in that moment as we sat there and talked, I remembered how I don’t have root beer floats that often. That reminded me how when I was little I would sit and watch tv with my grandmother as our day began with Bob Barker and The Price is Right and the line up ended with Judge Judy. But the root beer floats were always special in one how they were made, which is another story, and two in the circumstances in which we had them. Who really has a root beer float with their grandmother as a child while watching people play Plinko on tv? I did and  I loved it! It is interesting how we don’t need expensive things or elaborate items to share a nice moment with someone. All we need is some ice cream and soda. . .  and maybe some spoons and bowls, to give us a memory we will treasure for the rest of our lives.

In life, we have to enjoy the simpler things and Find Our Inner Smile as we go about our day-to-day activities.