As my football series will take up a lot of my content during the fall, I want to practice a little with short form writing. Those articles won’t be long, but 3 a week plus my health chronicles on Sunday will be a bit more than people are used to, especially if I decide to supplement the already written articles with other pieces.
So, today I want to briefly touch on appreciating the little things in life. Today, I was appreciating the smell of freshly cut grass. While I live in a suburban area, I happen to live in an incredibly green space. There are parks everywhere, and many of the trees that are centuries old still line streets in neighborhoods. At a different time, I may have found myself annoyed at the gentlemen cutting the grass being noisy, interrupting my reading and listening to podcasts.
This time, I just stopped, enjoyed the scenery, and enjoyed the pleasant smell.
Yesterday I picked up a part time gig at a plant nursery. While I was watering the plants, I was not only enjoying the beauty, the calmness, the subtle sounds around me, but also the bees! There were about 4 different kinds of bees that I saw while watering the plants. This is something I also may not have noticed at a different point in life. It was a joy to watch them do their work while also trying to avoid the water. I guess I wasn’t scared because I’m not allergic, but I also have only been stung once in my life I believe. It felt rejuvenating to just be in the moment amongst nature.
Even as my sleep has been a little on the fritz lately, appreciating stuff like this has been paramount to keeping my mental health in a good place and moving forward in life. There are plenty of reasons to have anxiety or get annoyed with our surroundings, but we should also take time to appreciate the little things that make us feel good and listen when life forces us to slow down.
Here’s to continuing that practice moving forward as life inevitably wants to go a million miles per second around us.
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I'm not an outdoorsy guy myself, but I do appreciate nature. The smell of freshly cut grass, as well as the smell of the earth just before a rain, are highly identifiable. They both say "summer" to me, for sure. Great read!