Just Doing It

Those days when you do the very last thing you want to do, and it turns out to spin you a new direction. Those days when you don't put off the thing that needs doing, and it introduces you to a game-changer friend.  Those days when you return a phone call that goes unnoticed in your messages for days and turns into a first date. Those days when it's completely inefficient or unessential to go get fresh ground peanut butter instead of stay in reading on a gray vacation morning, but then you go and you happen to meet a new source of happiness.

These things have happened to me on several notable occasions.

Once I turned down a street thinking, "Why not, I haven't driven home this way before," and I found my favorite letterpress print shop (Bartleby's Letterpress Emporium, now closed), at which I eventually purchased a most glorious broadside with all the right words on it.

Once when I coerced my daughter through the rain to a square dance she really did not want to go to, I bumped into an old friend from high school I had lost complete track of and really wondered about.

Once I called someone back that I didn't really know and didn't get my number from me and it spun out all kinds of pleasure.

Once I went to the grocery store for nut butter and water filters because my daughter really wanted to and passed by the volunteer shoppers filling carts from lists of people who can't do their own shopping, and my daughter really wanted to try it out.
So we asked about it. We got a crash course training, and we did it.

And that's how we became volunteer grocery shoppers. But we never would have been walking past a small army of slowly filling grocery carts at the grocery store on a weekday morning if we hadn't just done it. If I hadn't opted to aim for a bright spot of contentment and go to the grocery store for a few things that were not on the list, not urgently needed, and not my high priorities for the morning. And doing that brightened my daughter irrevocably.

We never really know when the people we meet or the places we venture are making memories that stick or planting actions with purpose or generating a chain reaction of smiles. Yet we never will know without just doing it.