High on Happiness

Posts Tagged ‘Encouraging’

When the situations of the day beat you up, dash your hopes, and stomp all over your finest expectations, here comes your friend, grin in hand, to dust you off and set you on your feet again.  Don’t you just love it?

One of the most beautiful things that best friends do for us is to encourage us when we’re down.  They meet us with their bag of tricks and keep pulling them out until they find the one that does the magic.

They sit and commiserate; they empathize and sympathize and cajole and rail.  They get right down there in the emotional stew with us and let us know we’re not alone and that yeah, we’re right to feel exactly what we feel.  They say, “Hey, we’re just humans, you know?  We’re the ones with the whole shebang inside us—the glory and the crap, remember?  And sometimes the crap plays top dog.”

And then, when we’re all comforted by being seen and heard and knowing we’re not alone, they start sneaking in their little pieces of uplift, building on our glimmers that we’re still okay, regardless.  They start pumping up our resilience.  They blow in some fresh wind, clear the skies.  They point at the stars and get us dreaming about reaching for them again and remind us that, yeah, we’re big enough to stretch that far.  They talk about keepin’ on keepin’ on.

They distract us and then, if we start sliding back into the muck, they haul out their dispute tools and get us to question our doubts.  Gosh, they’re good.

If you have a friend who lifts you when you’re down, next time, watch him or her at work.  Copy the technique.  If you don’t have one, make one up.  Keep him in your pocket.  Pull him out and set him on the chair beside you when you need him.  There’s nothing like it.