Thank you to @mommaserene who sent this over to me this morning.. it is perfection. I hope my son reads it someday and chuckles to himself – I will be doing this!

When I’m An Old Lady

And later, in bed, I’ll lie back and sigh,
and thank God in prayer and then close my eyes;
and my son will look down with a smile slowly creeping,
and say with a groan, “She’s so sweet when she’s sleeping,”
. . . when I’m an old lady and live with my son.

It’s a common sentiment, “Walk a mile in my shoes”, or, “Try to relate,” it’s easy to tell someone to try to relate to someone else, but is it as easy to do?

The truth is we are a self involved people. It’s hard to see past ourselves, our problems, our families and our hardships. I know we all mean well, at least most of us do, and we’d like to think we consider other people’s feelings pretty consistently, but do we really?

I don’t think so. If that were true and we were really good about empathizing with each other, the crime rates wouldn’t be as high and there would be less victims overall in every walk of life.

When you come across someone who gets under your skin, or makes you very angry with their actions, Stop. Take a breath. If you know this person well enough to know their circumstances, consider them before you become emotional, is there something in that persons’ life that is causing them to react to this situation in a way that they may not otherwise?

Have a little moment to yourself and think about the other person, what they might be going through, what kind of difficulties they could be facing in life, even if all you can muster is, “They must be having a bad day” that still gives you the mental understanding that there’s another person involved in this besides you, including whatever has happened to them today.

Your next question to yourself is this: Do I have to make this day harder on them? Immediately after that, ask yourself this: Can I make their day better?

Do you hold the key to a smile on that persons’ face? Use it! Can you do something to lighten their load and make life a little more bearable for them today? Do it! What do you have to lose by helping someone out today?

I challenge you this week to do one thing each day to bring a smile to someone’s else’s face, it doesn’t matter who or how easy or how hard it was, do it and then come back here and tell me about it, how did it make you feel to be the source of a smile?

Changing the shoes you’re seeing the world in can change your perspective drastically.