Anything But Vanilla

This morning my alarm went off at 6:11am and I woke up, turned on the TV and got dressed for work.  I was in the car by 8:30am and I drove the same roads I drive Monday through Friday back to the town I know better than any other place in the world.  I finished my eye liner in the rear view mirror of my car while sitting in the parking lot of my office building and then I grabbed my purse and laptop bag and walked inside for yet another day of work.  I strolled down the short hallway to my cubicle, sat down, plugged in my computer and logged on at ten of 9.  It was somewhere around this time during my routine morning that I realized my life is vanilla.

Ok so I admit that life isn’t always going to be exciting.  There is a lot of ordinary items that have to be taken care of but there is a fine line between routine and boring.  I think that sometimes we don’t realize exactly when we are walking on that boring side of the line.  Of course there is always the upside to routine and that is that nothing bad is happening but is that enough of a reason to just coast through every day without actually making any of those days stand out? 

So today, I say break the rut!  On my living room wall, I have a quote that says, “We don’t remember days, we remember moments” and I think we should always be looking to make some moments.  Go out and do something today you wouldn’t normally do.  It doesn’t matter what it is, just something different.  Meet a friend for happy hour after a long day, stay out a little later tonight, kiss someone you've always wanted to (if your single), stop tonight for dinner out instead of at home or maybe treat yourself to a manicure.  Watch the baseball game at a bar instead of sitting on your couch, actually book that trip you’ve been talking about taking, take the long way home from work just to listen to the radio and try to win those concert tickets you want, or anything to just add a little something to what might otherwise be a plain vanilla kind of day. 

In a year or even a few weeks, you probably won’t look back on this day and remember exactly what you did but tonight when you go to bed, I guarantee you will smile because today was a good day.  Today was different.  And who knows, maybe for some of you, it will be doing something different that will be the difference in your life.  You never know what can happen. 

"I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back."  - Maya Angelou