Sometimes the greatest reminders about how beautiful it is to live this life can come in the strangest way. This article’s title came to me in the hit 2009 Zombie Comedy film Zombieland. Rule #32 baby

While for Woody Harrelson’s amazing character Tallahassee, it was more about finding a Twinkie, the treat from Hostess, before it expired. For everyone else, it could be something even more simple.

After my show last Friday night, I was so amped up with the high that only comes from doing what you love, and when I went to write my post-experience social media post, I referenced one of the songs I sang by Dierks Bentley called “Living.”

“Some days you just get by, yeah some days you’re just alive, but some days you’re living.” -Dierks Bentley, (song written by Dierks Bentley, Ashley Gorley, Ross Copperman and Jon Nite.)

That’s a great lyric itself, but the one that made me think was; I saw a tree i’ve seen a thousand times / a bird on a branch and I watched it fly away in the wind / and it hit me /it’s a beautiful world, sometimes I don’t see so clear.

Just a subtle little reminder to enjoy some of the most beautiful things that happen every day that we take for granted. Every tree is a miracle. Birds have hollow bones that they use to push up on the air to fly. Sunrises and sunsets are portraits painted by the universe.

We often get so caught up in the day to day grind. We deal with stressers and sometimes we are hanging on by a thread. It’s a crazy world out there sure, but we put so much gravity and weight on the trying things in our lives. What if we were to flip it and put more weight and gravity on the things that make us smile??

We use more muscles to frown than we do to smile, so we think that the negative holds us down harder, when we actually need to produce LESS effort to achieve a happiness point. Take that in for a second. It’s actually easier to achieve happiness than it is to achieve sorrow and angst and stress.

So when I think about the little things I enjoy, I can give myself the boost I need to turn a bad day into a good one. Trust me, it isn’t always an easy first step, but when you take that action, it does work.

Personally I have had the absolute most difficult two weeks of my professional career at work recently. I was spewing the whole Murphy’s Law of if anything could go wrong it would go wrong, and it did. Again and again. When I punched the clock on Friday I was beyond exhausted, but I had a show to play that night. Instead of dwelling on the fact that I have to have a day job, I went with the gratitude approach of “how lucky am I that I get to do something I love on my free time?”

I had to let go of the things weighing me down. I had to find a way to remember all the blessings I have.

Some of the little things I’ve gotten to enjoy since I punched the clock are the following;

• Watching my son giggle
• Watching the dust fly up from behind a tractor in a field
• Appreciating a great joke from John Mulaney about his intervention
• Seeing the night sky from outside of the city
• The smell of freshly cut grass
• How much joy my cat Kabsy has lying on my sound system
• How excited my dog Phoebe gets when we jangle her leash
• How quiet it is on a Sunday morning at 6am
• How amazing the coffee smells brewing in the morning
• How cool it is to still play with Lego as an adult
• The applause I get from a hometown crowd after singing a song I wrote
• How delicious Heineken’s non-alcoholic beer is
• How appealing using Windex is on the bathroom mirror

It’s a solid way to ground yourself from the outside noise, the societal pressures and the stress you’re dealing with in your day to day. I encourage you write down a list of things you have enjoyed lately, no matter how small those things seem.

A great book I could reccommend that basically lists off these little joys in life is called “The Book of Awesome.” It was written by Neil Pasricha, whom we have discussed previously in this blog while referencing another one of his books titled “The Happiness Equation.”

“The Book of Awesome” originated as a blog site where we would simply write one random thing that he thought was awesome. Eventually, these posts were all stapled together and the book was born. It was a best-seller for a reason. It’s also one of the biggest reasons I started writing this blog. Hey, if Neil could turn his blog into a book, why can’t I?

Most of the things that take away our joy are things that we don’t even remember a week later, so why are we letting him them ruin our days when there is so much happiness to bask in instead???

With that being said, I’m going to sip on an alcohol-free Heineken, go outside and do some yard work while listening to a playlist I made of songs that I love. Then I’m gonna take my family out swimming, before we grab some Cineplex popcorn and hunker down in our living room for a family movie night. Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come is already purchased and ready to go.

Enjoy the little things baby!