Having fun, changing my focus

A good sport; My 84 year old mother, trying on the high heels

I was visiting my mother the other day and she needed to go to the mall to return a lawn chair. She didn’t seem to have the slip but assured me,  ”It is easy to do returns at Target. They are very nice.” My mother returns a lot of stuff. She gets bored, shops, and then decides later that she doesn’t really want the chair, coat, jacket, shoes…or any number of other things that caught her eye as she wandered the mall, so she returns them. I joked with her that the major department stores are going to start putting her picture up at their cash registers with a warning, “If this woman comes through the line, ask her if she really wants the items in her cart. If she hesitates, then encourage her to put them back.” She laughed at this as we made our way, with the lawn chair, to Target’s customer service.

A while back, I would have given my mother a lecture about her “personal return policy”; told her how wrong I thought it was to shop like this, how much extra work she was making for the stores, asked her  to”examine” her life. It wouldn’t have changed her shopping habits, but it would have made our trips, to return her purchases, grim.

After we returned the chair, we stopped by T.J Maxx’s shoe dept. I dared her to try on this pair of very tall, snake skin? shoes. She took me up on it! I tried to get a better photo but she was laughing and saying, “Hurry ….my calves are cramping up!” You wouldn’t believe the number of women who came by and told her how good these shoes looked on her (which made her laugh all the more). She always replied, “My daughter is going to put me up on her, what do you call it?…her blog!”

“We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what’s wrong in your life, or you can focus on what’s right“. Marianne Williamson

For this weekend, how about taking one thing in your life that feels “wrong” and making it your intention to find the good in it. …see how it changes when your focus is different.

a better look at the shoes!

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we are all in this together

Great picture sent to me by a friend last night

So, we have our plane reservations made and are now working on a place to stay. I’ve sent out a bunch of emails to bungalow/beach house owners, asking prices and in some cases, seeing if they would be willing to come down in price to meet our budget. I have never done this before. I’ve always believed that negotiating prices (on anything) was not the “right” thing to do. It occurred to me the other day that I could try to do it differently.

Instead of not even considering a place that is over our budget, I could simply ask them. As I did this, I noticed a fear that asking for a lower price would make the transaction somehow adversarial. When I told Jack how I was feeling, he laughed and said, “They can say yes or no, or even email back with an in-between price, but your emails were really polite. No one is going to get offended Mary.”

It struck me, as I closed my computer last night, and put the search to bed also, that maybe my email will be just what someone was hoping for too…that what we want, also wants us.

“There is only one of us here: What we give to others, we give to ourselves. What we withhold from others, we withhold from ourselves. In any moment, when we choose fear instead of love, we deny ourselves the experience of Paradise.” Marianne Williamson

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