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A friend of mine posted a recipe on Facebook that included the unexpected but glorious use of peanut butter.
Along with the instructions, she noted that very few recipes are not improved by the use of peanut butter.
For peanut butter lovers like me, it’s a universal truth, and it made me wonder how that applies to everyday life: What are things that I do or things I include that make a day better?
There were two things I thought of right away: One is laughing. Whether it’s a good thing that’s happening or a bad thing that’s happening, laughter seems to improve it.
For example, yesterday I was at a store that I go to pretty frequently, and as I was walking towards the register another customer kind of ran in front of me with, of course, 65 items while I was holding one and dumped them triumphantly onto the counter.
The store associate at the register said to the customer, “Do you have a rewards card?” The customer said “I do but it’s out in my car and I don’t feel like getting it.”
The associate said,” Do you have a telephone number associated with the account because you can enter that and that’ll work too!”
The customer got angry, and said, “I don’t want to enter my telephone number! I’m not going to do that!”
The associate said, “Okay, no problem” and scanned the first item.
The customer looks shocked at the price that flashes on the screen and says, “This is supposed to be on sale!”
The associate replied, without missing a beat, “It is on sale. If you have the rewards card.”
I know this associate from going in the store frequently; every time that rude customer had a small outburst, the associate turned to me and then back to the customer. He knew I knew. And I knew he knew.
It made me laugh … just something funny happening in this situation that was otherwise mildly irritating. I’m sure you can relate to that.
The second thing that I have found improves a day — the other peanut butter that improves my daily life — learning something.
It doesn’t have to be something profound, and it might not even be something I was specifically looking for.
There are two ways this tends to happen. First, if I’m reading newspaper or magazine, I will read something I’m not typically interested in and see if there’s anything new that I can learn from that.
Second, if I’m looking for something specific on YouTube to learn how to do, oftentimes I will see another video, maybe not even related to the one that I was watching, that has some interesting cool or useful tip in it, I don’t care whether it’s how to start a fire using Fritos or how to get the last bit of toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube. It doesn’t be profound. It’s just that learning something new tends to improve the day.
