Something little made me smile the other day. It was an off-hand comment, but it came at just the right time for an unknowingly-teachable moment.

Every now and then I hear commentary about myself that I’m just so positive, so laid-back, so happy…and it makes me chuckle.

See I want to be like that. I think you make your own happiness, I think you can in theory choose how to react to something big or little. But sometimes you just react. And I’m a nervous person by nature. I get pretty anxious in certain settings and then I tend to ruminate about them ahead of time and afterwards. But, I’m also a pretty good coper, generally I note what situations make me feel like that- and I avoid them! I know some people naturally try to work through their issues and conquer them. I’m generally not a conqueror. It’s not my style. I’m ok with my weaknesses and I’d rather just try to work around them.  I try to think about what matters, and rationalize whether something is worth fretting over or not. Of course if I find that the process to figure that out in and of itself is eating up my psyche- well, then I need to work on it.

At any rate, I was sitting ruminating about something that was bugging me. It’s something that’s come up before, and probably would come up again. And probably would bug me when it does again. Right at that moment that I was stewing about it, I got a phone call and when I told her what I was just thinking about she said, “Well you are the right person to deal with that, you’re so laid-back! I’m sure it doesn’t really bug you at all!”

It was just the push I needed at that moment to get over it, get over myself and move along. Sometimes we just need that little reminder, that others already see us as the person we want to be.