Happiness is realising you are someone else’s reason to smile

I paused to watch a child, who spying me looking at them broke into a spontaneous giggle.

She was such a little dot, just about a year old, yet her natural curiosity and big ‘blue boo boo eyes’ caused me to stop and chat with her mother, to enquire how she was, to remark on her child’s adorable smile and to ask how old her child was. No sinister intent just the kind of chat that parents often engage in.

And as we chatted her child looked at me in a very concentrated way, then she reached out, struck out a chubby finger, pointed, threw back her head and broke into a spontaneous chuckle. Pausing I looked into an adjacent mirror. I obviously didn’t see what she saw.

I saw a somewhat harried figure caught in a transient moment between rushing from one task to another, wearing a much loved and comfortable dress that had been captured on camera some 5 years before at a previous event where the same group of friends had gathered in celebration. How passe? No amount of positive reframing to self of ‘being grateful that five years on I can still get in the dress’ Oh No! that would have been far too easy.

She, impervious to my discomfort and angst obviously saw something completely different, a curiosity, and a laughable one at that, and do you know in that moment an idea began to form, to mushroom and grow.  And as it began to push its way out of the dross that symbolises much of everyday life I began to I realise that very little in our lives really does matter. When I look back in five years time will the things I am worrying about now still be as important? Probably not!

Its a dog’s life!