Happiness Infusion

Ten Happiness Stories to help you cope with life's stress, anxiety, burdens, and sorrows. Every person has unhappy lemon stories, with details, dates, names, places, and consequences. Their happy lemonade stories are usually not as specific. For a woman, most of the happy stories are general - a baby was born or a child baptized, a son or daughter went to the LDS temple for the first time, a vacation was enjoyed at such-and-such lake, a child completed a task without being asked, a...
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Ten Happiness Stories to help you cope with life's stress, anxiety, burdens, and sorrows. Every person has unhappy lemon stories, with details, dates, names, places, and consequences. Their happy lemonade stories are usually not as specific. For a woman, most of the happy stories are general - a baby was born or a child baptized, a son or daughter went to the LDS temple for the first time, a vacation was enjoyed at such-and-such lake, a child completed a task without being asked, a child responded to the need of another. I likely haven't asked enough women, but the routine, day-to-day illustrations of how life is happy aren't as apparent as I expected. Witness the nightly news as well. I look at my own life. I ask, "Where are my happy stories?" I'm reminded of what the atheist said to the Christian, "You wear your religion like a headache." Is it possible I wear my motherhood like a headache? I honestly don't mean to, but that is the way it may be perceived - I'm always in a hurry, always stressed, always with one more thing I must do, always worrying about the lemons of life, anxious because of this or that situation. One day I wasn't fully dressed; as Annie sings to Daddy Warbucks, "You're never fully dressed without a smile." It wasn't that I was in a bad mood, but I'm sure I was not smiling when I finally got to the cleaners after taking a couple of the children school shopping, picking up another child from work, then collating, labeling, and mailing a Church newsletter all in under three hours. Anyway, there I was, emotionally out of breath, at the cleaners. A woman came in after me. I turned to look at her, and for no reason she gave me a beautiful, all's-well-in-the-world smile. She just smiled at me. On one occasion, I was in an airplane during a tremendous storm. There were two stewardesses in our section of the plane. One of them kept telling us to stay in our seats with our seat belts buckled. She yelled at a woman who stood up and said that she had to have a place to lie down because the jolting was causing excruciating back pain. She wouldn't let anyone use the restroom. The other stewardess took a conspicuous seat and smiled at those who gave her eye contact. She picked up a magazine and read (I'm sure pretending) for a few minutes now and then. Turning lemons into lemonade, she gave the impression that there was nothing to worry about. Her peaceful smile and spirit were appreciated.