Today I have two great quotes!  Both were sitting on my heart today.  They are by the beloved Thich Nhat Hanh.

“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”

The other day I was sitting with a client and we were talking about how sometimes we just don’t FEEL like smiling (or getting up in the morning, changing our attitude, letting someone “off the hook”…).

Sometimes it’s as though we are waiting for something outside of us to be our source of joy — waiting for something to shift, someone else to change, something to bring us happiness or cause us to smile.

I love TNH’s reminder that sometimes just choosing to smile DESPITE how we FEEL can actually shift our sense of joy, our outlook, and even our situation.

The miracle, then, is just as TNH says — it’s NOT walking on water, it’s realizing that we have a choice about how we “do” the everyday ordinary stuff of our day.

It’s choosing to smile instead of waiting for circumstances, emotions, or thoughts to shift.

It’s realizing that circumstances, emotions, and thoughts can actually shift because of our decision to smile.  Our decision to CHOOSE JOY.

I have to admit, I find this pretty hard to do especially on Wednesdays.   At about 4 pm it’s pretty hard for me not to complain.  I hold on tightly to the distorted belief that IF ONLY my circumstances would change, everyone napped today, …blah blah blah…. THEN I’d be less stressed (I wrote a post on this about the “if only” myth with our partners).

Maybe some of that is true.  I definitely know I could use more sleep as well as time to myself.

But my experience of Wednesdays could poooooossibly be different if I chose to smile – despite my circumstances, despite my tired bones, despite how I felt or what I thought.

Maybe it’d be different if I chose to believe that just getting food on the table, cuddling with my three year old, holding our little seven month old, and chatting with a neighbor for 10 minutes at the playground are all miracles.  And it is enough.

A lovely way to care for ourselves and shift our moods is to CHOOSE JOY.  Choose to smile in THIS moment.

Embrace the miracle of just breathing into the moment and choosing to softly smile.  THAT is enough.