Grumpy or Gracious

There have been some reasons for me to be grumpy lately. Some are general (pandemics, politics, social strife). Some are personal (goals, hurdles, not losing my Christmas weight). There are moments where those circumstances affect too much of me. They affect the conversations I have with people around me and the person inside me.

Yesterday, I had two conversations with two different people. One was during an encounter with a stranger, the other was during lunch with a friend.

The first one was at a coffee shop counter. I ordered my regular drink from one of my regular coffee haunts. The morning had gone well so far. I was actually pretty happy. However, when I got my drink, it was the wrong drink. The person who took my order heard me wrong. It was really wrong... it had hazelnut syrup in it. I really don’t like hazelnut or their evil cousins, pecans or walnuts (don’t even get me started…). I was suspicious before I drank it because when they called out my drink, I thought they may have said hazelnut, but I wasn’t really listening. As I walked away, what the worker said echoed in my head. “Did she say hazelnut?” I looked at the cup and it had two letters on it - HN. On no… Maybe I can handle it. I took a sip. NOPE. I turned around and walked back. Since I was having such a positive morning, I politely said, “I think the other lady misheard my order. I wanted heavy cream and I think she thought I said hazelnut.” I smiled and gave her back the cup and she apologized and remade my drink. As she handed me the drink, she said, “I appreciate your spirit with that…”

As I walked away, I wondered how many people had approached her with a different spirit. Too bad that my being nice seemed unusual enough to her that she commended me for it. It’s also too bad that if I had been having a less stellar day, that my spirit would have been different - lesser and grumpier. After all, they were messing with my coffee!

Later I had lunch with a friend. More than his day has been less than stellar recently. He has a few things on his list - the least of which is being in the middle of a job search. We all know how that can be: being in a constant state of insecurity, depending on other people’s evaluation of your skills and them deciding whether or not you are a match for their vision and culture. As we talked through some of this stuff, I asked him how he was doing. He said he was really not good at all.

I thought back to some conversations we had several months ago where we had agreed that we should meet regularly because he’d needed to talk things through in his life with someone besides himself. Well, we hadn’t done that - for at least a couple of months. His conversations with himself had imploded a bit. He had become perpetually grumpy. His circumstances had overcome his spirit.

We agreed to re-up our meetings on a regular basis and actually calendared the very next one. He seemed to immediately get less grumpy right in front of me!

The fact is that circumstances have a huge bearing on our outlook and our spirit, and in turn on our community, even if our community is the coffee shop barista who screws up your drink. Part of our responsibility is our response-ability. If we would do a little more than only talk to ourselves when things are going differently than we’d prefer, if we would talk to a person or two other than ourselves, we would usually find relief and the grumpy person would leave the room.

Walk braver and stronger with someone today - even if things are going well... but especially if they aren’t.

#braverandstrongertogether #badcoffee #ResponseAbilityIsYourResponsibility #talktosomeone #dontgratifygrumpy #benice #Responsibility