Nicole Marica: There's Your Sign

The chef that works in the cafeteria in my office building is such a positive, optimistic person. We had a really great conversation a few weeks ago about how he chooses to find the good in everything after he spent several minutes looking for sausage patties that another chef who was filling in for him placed somewhere else than where they normally were. Any regular person in his situation would have been so angry and probably cursing the other chef, but when he did find them eventually, his only response was "oh he put them in this dish to save room, that is so nice of him". I was amazed at his positivity. I've never met someone who wouldn't have been incredibly annoyed at not being able to locate something that someone else "misplaced". His response to me was that he was so much happier when he spent less time focusing on the negativity and found the good in everything.

It's something I really try to strive for, but it's really easier said than done. I resolved to try and emulate this great behavior and was put to the test a few nights ago. A "friend", who I'm kind of stuck with due to their connections with family, was trying very hard to bring me down and be negative in the most passive aggressive way possible. My first reaction was to rage. I wanted to storm around the house, I wanted to unfriend and block her on Facebook and erase any existence that we ever were friends. It made me so angry that my stomach was in knots.

Then the conversation I had with the chef came back to me and I realized that it was more important to me to focus on the people who cared about me than to allow the one person who was filled with so much negativity that she had to bring me down to pull herself up to get to me (holy run on sentence, Batman!).

I had just gotten home from teen book club and though about about the teens, how much they cared about me, and the club, and how much I cared about them.

I thought about my friend Sherrie who works at the library and the sheer joy on her face as we shared great news to each other from the past month.

I thought about Dave and how lucky I am.

I thought about Nibbler and Squishee and how loved I am.

I thought about my mom, my Aunt Steph, and Aunt Penny and how proud they are of me.

Suddenly a parade of family and friends that loved me began to march through my mind, and that one "friend's" actions suddenly were insignificant and petty.

As I sat there I thought to myself, "oh her actions just gave me a great blog post, how nice of her" and I smiled.

Then my phone beeped this message (from the Tiny Buddha app):