Today I challenged my boyfriend to look at his workplace a little differently. I gave him a task to look for the best label on a specific type of product. I didn’t give him any other parameters except that it had to be a single type of item and he had to give me reasons why he chose it. It was an attempt to give him a way to have more fun at a place he doesn’t always enjoy, and it made me realize that life could be so much more fun in general if we all gave ourselves quirky little tasks like that to help us get through the day. If it’s a task you don’t enjoy doing, look for a way to make it more enjoyable: give yourself a task like picking your favorite about it, or try to figure out how many colors you see while do the task, or any other odd type of thing to notice. Its a way to force your mind to look at it from a different perspective and have a new way of looking at your surroundings. Starting with little things just to help make the day go by faster or at least less un-enjoyable and could eventually work up to making every day a good day because everything is being looked at in a new light. And believe me, I know some days it’s really hard to look for any sort of silver lining. We have all been there. It feels like everything is piling on top of you until you are buried so deep you can’t even see where up or down is. Those are the days we need these little ideas the most. One glimpse of daylight can help renew our strength to dig out of that hole and bask in the light. I’ve also had the days where I just wanted to be in the dark, I didn’t want to fight any more, or try any more, just wanted to sit there, alone and miserable… and that’s okay, those days are part of life and don’t make us bad or broken, we just have to try not to let those days take over to where we forget what the daylight looked like. It’s like a quote from Gandalf in the Hobbit movies “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay… small acts of kindness and love.” Granted Sauron is not trying to take over Middle Earth, there is still truth in fact that it’s the small things that keep the darkness at bay.