“The positive always outweighs the negative.” – Anne Brannen’s paper weight

Sitting here tonight with my dear, dear friend Anne Brannen “working on” our graduate projects, she helped me to realize the above quote. Yes, the truth comes out, I haven’t finished my thesis, there is not a diploma in my beautiful frame my mother got me (Thanks again, Mom, it’s BEAUTIFUL, and it’s just getting comfortable in its own skin before I fill it. That’s all.)

Many of you might be thinking, WHY NOT!?!  Get it done!  Well, you’re not necessarily just thinking that, I’ve heard you say it too. If you’d like to to know the truth, I just don’t feel like it. There it is, that’s it. At the end of a long day of work and working out and trying to be social after two years of non-social grad school, finishing a 60+ page paper isn’t at the top of my want to-do list when I get home. It’s not that we haven’t TRIED to finish it. Anne and I have actually tried very hard. We have put dates on the calendar to meet more times than I can count. These graduate paper meetings turn into venting sessions about how tired we are or catching up on each other’s lives. Well, tonight, once we realized that we would be pushing this back just one more time since it’s too late to turn in a few drafts in time before the deadline this semester, I asked Anne to pick my quote for the night. Her response? “The positive always outweighs the negative. It’s on my paper weight.”

Well, short story long, she’s right. Things have been really busy lately, life has been a little stressful, but, just yesterday, one of our training clients took a cab to our office to bring me fresh baked cookies…just because! That thoughtful act of kindness and appreciation, which was so simple, made the rest of my life disappear for a bit. This just proves that even a small positive can outweigh a mound of negatives. Thanks Anne Brannen for helping me to realize how the random act of kindness behind the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies I was given yesterday outweighed everything else!

Need a good idea for a random act of kindness? The cookies have the answer…go ahead, have one!