A Happy Happenstance

I love to read.  Anything.  Well, anything except the old classics, like Dickens, Little Women, Bronte....you know; all the stuff any literary student or lover or what have you would roll over if they heard me say that.  But, it's true.  However, you may at any time catch me reading the dictionary, I love consulting a thesaurus, encyclopedias (the actual book ones that most kids probably don't even know what I'm talking about now), biographies, fiction, and as of recent, more and more, I'm loving non-fiction.  I am also not a sci-fi or fantasy lover.  You'll never catch me with something like "The Never-Ending Story" in my lap.  I love reading newspapers.  Magazines, blogs, you name it, and my very favorite of all time:  quotations.

It will come as no surprise to you that on this day of a happy happenstance, I was spending my lunch break much like others lunch breaks I have at Barnes and Noble.  Just browsing, picking up books whose covers interested me, being at my highest point of ADHD, what with all the visual things to look at and my mind wanting to stop and look at one thing while my eyes moved over EVERYTHING, and never stopped, it happened, I'm sure not by coincidence, that my mind and eyes both stopped for *just* a millisecond on the same  thing, and then as my ADHD mind often does, it made that noise like when the dj stops the record in the middle of the party and they both (again, miraculously at the same time) landed back on a small, yellow, nondescript, little book.  A(You can see it, and you should probably buy it here:  http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/46057/how-to-hug-a-porcupine-by-hatherleigh/ .)  OK, it may have been a little bit descript because it did have a small drawing on it of a porcupine.  Which brought my eyes up over Mr. Porky's head to the title of the book:  How to Hug a Porcupine.  "Huh," my mind thought...."this should be interesting...." and so I did what I do, and I picked the book up and flipped it over to the back to see what it was all about.  But, before flipping the cover over to the back side, the words under the title kinda smacked me in the face...."Easy ways to love the difficult people in your life."  I was hooked.

As a generally happy person who can get along with just about anyone and can make mad people happy before they know what's happened, it bothered me that the man in my life was *not* on my list of people I wanted to be around.  He had become grumpy, moody, mean, abusive with his words and actions, Jekyll and Hyde, if you will.  I never knew from moment to moment who I was going to get.  What I did know is that it had gotten to the point that pretty much, no matter what he did, it got on my nerves.  Really bad.  Not just a little.  I mean STOMPED ALL OVER THEM, like a party goer on Cinco de Mayo with their sombrero on, doing the hat dance.  Yes, like that.  Even when he was being likeable, I didn't like him.  How could I have went from loving him and being around him and wanting to always being around him to never wanting to even look at him?  I know part of the answer to that now, but then, I did not, so this book seemed like a practical place for me to start...learning easy ways to love the difficult person in my life.

In the forward of the book, one sentence caught my eye.  This is what it said:  "Every time we practice kindness, compassion, and unconditional acceptance of others, we are reinforcing it within and for ourselves."  What I took away from that was every time I was *not* doing those things, I was reinforcing negativity, and cultivating a part of myself into something that I despised at my very core.  I mean, people, come ONNNN....really!!!!  It costs NOTHING to be kind!!!!  Not one penny.  Just maybe some words here or there, holding a door open for someone with full hands, maybe smiling at a stranger, or looking the barista at Starbucks in the eye before you drive off, telling them to have a great day, but saying it like you mean it, and treating them like a real person!  Zero dollars involved.  Magnificent difference on the whole world?  Yes.  Why not?

I bought the book without even consulting the back cover for a price.  It didn't matter; it was going home with me.  If I had to skip lunch for the rest of the week to pay for it, ok...it's just food and I can always stand to lose a few pounds anyways.  This was to be my new "bible" on how to care and love (again) this person with so many quills that poked me every. single. day.  I was on a mission.