Imagining and Influencing

How many of you do the same thing day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year? Many of us fall into routines and before we know it our actions become almost subconscious. Although I have fallen into routines in some parts of my life, other parts are anything but routine.

I can easily say that I travel the same way to work about 90% of the time. It’s just something I do without thinking. Sometimes I’ll change it up and take a different route to enjoy new scenery or to avoid certain areas clogged with traffic.

For the past few years I’ve noticed a guy who leaves for work about the same time I drive by his house every day. I don’t know anything about him, but he intrigues me. Every time it snows he gets up early to clear the driveway.  His truck is always parked in the same spot and by looking at the ladder racks I can reasonably guess he’s a construction worker of some type. When he leaves his home he heads north. Since most of the population in this area is to the south it makes me wonder where he’s going.

I’ve also noticed that he lives alone. His truck is the only vehicle in the driveway and if he’s gone before I drive by in the morning there’s never any lights on inside the house. Whenever I see him outside I giggle to myself because in some ways this man and I are alike. He appears to be around the same age as me, he’s single, he drives a truck, he goes to work early and he gets home in the late afternoon/early evening.

Well, the last few months I’ve noticed more activity around his house. When I passed by in the morning I began seeing a small car parked in front of his truck. I wasn’t sure whether he picked the car up for gas mileage or if it belonged to someone. Since I saw where he had cleaned the snow off from it a few times in the late spring I got the idea he knew how to treat a woman. Who knows, I could be completely wrong, but I did know he made sure someone’s car was cleared from snow when the weather was miserable.

Last Saturday I drove by his house and saw him building a rock wall. I didn’t pay much attention and continued on my way downtown. After I picked up a few prescriptions I headed home. On my return trip I saw a beautiful girl helping him with the rock wall. They were working on it together.  They had gloves on and both of them were kneeling in the dirt. As I drove by I could see them smiling and talking. For some reason the scene was refreshing.

I’m not sure what kept the man single for so long, but I could see that he was comfortable with his current status. I will probably never know anything about him or the woman, but it’s fun to imagine their stories.

Sometimes we dismiss things that we encounter every day. We don’t give anything more than a passing thought. If we allow our minds to wander once in a while we might just go to some wonderful places. My imagination ventured into a beautiful land Saturday evening. I saw things I liked and for some reason the faces of the man and woman kept coming back.

From there I saw myself traveling to the places I love. Sometimes our routines become so engrained in our lives we forget to take time out to experience other things that could bring a little more richness into our lives. We’re scared to try new things. We don’t want people to interrupt the normalcy we have created for ourselves. Instead, we keep driving down the same roads, eating the same dinners, talking to the same people and missing out on things that could bring us into a new and foreign place within ourselves.

As spring fades into summer try new things. Face your fears and give the things out of your comfort zone a try. Heck, you might just find happiness someplace you never imagined. Treat people as you want to be treated and always remember to be kind to other people. You never know what battle another person is fighting. Your kindness might be all they need to get to another day or to inspire them to achieve great things. If you can impact one life you have made a difference in this world. You’ll never know how far your influence will travel if you do the right things. Keep chasing rainbows and help people find the lucky little guy at the end of them. You can never give away too much of your treasure.

There are treasures all over if we look close enough for them.

There are treasures all over if we look close enough for them.

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