More Happiness from Starbucks

So, I’m out of coffee beans at home. I wander into my regular Starbucks location for coffee, and decide to pick up a pound of… something. But I’m looking at six different possibilities. What’s the difference? I’m so confused. This is the same feeling I get when I’m standing in the wine aisle. How can I choose without tasting?

A barista notices my perplexity, and makes an offer: “would you like me to press that for you?”

My first reaction was, “you mean, like iron it? Huh?” She explained that she’d be happy to grind a bit of it up and make a fresh pot in the French Press for me to taste. I accepted her offer.

Five minutes later, I had my own private coffee tasting!

And that made me very happy.

Happy Coincidences

My wife’s brother is getting (re)married in a couple weeks, and we need to have a modest gift (it’s a third marriage, so no crockpot for this one!).  She came across an old photo of her parents’ wedding a few weeks ago, which sparked an idea.

The bride-to-be is really “into” vintage photos, which hang about the house.  So we searched out a wedding photo for each of the grandparents, to put with the parents’ photo.  The plan is to have them all scanned, turned into matching 5×7 shots, and put into a nice frame.  That’s nice, but not the best part.

The two photos show a similar wedding portrait from early last century (the two couples were married about two years apart in the mid-1920s).  The groom is seated, while the bride stands slightly behind and to the right, so as to show off the entire length of the white dress and veil.  The shots are two different sizes and carry different backgrounds, so at first glance they are quite distinct.

Until you look closely — and I’m apparently the first one to ever do this.

“Sweetie…. come here and look at this,” I invited.  She came over and looked.  We looked again.  We put it under a magnifying glass to confirm.

BOTH grooms are sitting in the same chair.  Not just a similar pose, we now realized — the SAME pose.  The exact same carved wooden chair, identical down to the little patch of frayed material on the corner of the cushion.

It’s a tiny little coincidence, but really neat to know that these two couples who came from very different worlds — one a pair of second-generation Germans and the other very new immigrants from Slovakia — ended up going to the same place to memorialize their wedding, not knowing that 30 years from that time two of their offspring would meet and marry.

Isn’t that just cool to know?!

And it put me in mind of a little coincidence with our own parents.  Early in our relationship, we realized that both sets of parents were married on the same date.  It was just a little tiny coincidence that we interpreted as a sign from The Universe that it had some plans for us to be together, all along.

Apparently those happy coincidences go back a couple generations!

So now, I’m wondering what other tiny little message The Universe plants around world.  Have YOU come across any meaningful coincidences in your world, lately?  Please, share!

People hear what they see

Many movies today have such short and limited runs that most of us never hear about them, especially if they are released in the shadow of some summer or holiday blockbuster flick.  That’s sad, because so many of those ‘little’ movies are really fabulous — they are unconventional, thoughtful, creative, and often showcase some incredible acting.

I’ve learned that one of the best ways to discover obscure movies that I’ll enjoy is by noting the trailers packaged with a similar movie.  Romantic comedies tend to carry previews for other sweet comedies, intelligent movies for other smart films, etc.  So when I fall in love with a film, I write down the other titles previewed on that same DVD, then put them in my Blockbuster queue.

One such film arrived last week, and on Saturday evening Cheryl and I sat down to enjoy a movie we’d never heard of:  Beyond the Sea.  It’s a biopic about Bobby Darin, a singer/actor who was popular in the late 50′s and 60′s.  Kevin Spacey (a very talented guy!) clearly has a fixation on Bobby Darin — he wrote the script, directed the movie, and starred in it, (along with Kate Bosworth who makes a stunning Sandra Dee!)

Kevin is a decade older than Bobby Darin ever was, but in this cleverly written, part-fantasy, part-musical, part-drama, part-theatre-within-a-movie, that element matters not — Kevin plays the role as both actor and narrator.  IMO, it’s a very clever device that he pulls off beautifully.

Anyway, here’s the set up for what I thought was the best line in the movie:

Bobby rises to stardom, then disappears for awhile.  He’s totally disenchanted with the world following the 1968 assassination of Bobby Kennedy, whom he adored, so he goes into seclusion to figure out life.  He emerges to make a comeback.  He’d always been successful as a clean-shaven, suit-wearing, upbeat nightclub singer.  He comes back to the stage as a mustached, balding hippie who sings anti-war ballads.  He flops.

In the dramatic sequence that follows (as he grows progressively weaker, his heart failing as a result of rheumatic fever as a child),  he laments that audiences won’t listen to his new music.  His wife says, “Bobby, people hear what they see.“  That’s it! he exclaims.  and so he sets up a new act.

Clean-shaven, with a full head of hair and a suit, he appears on stage singing “We don’t want no war” and it’s a sensation.

People hear what they see.  When he showed up as someone else and sang something unexpected, people were turned off.  When he showed up LOOKING like what people expected, they heard him in an entirely different way.  They were able to “hear” the unfamiliar thru the lens of what they already knew.

On multiple levels, this concept so appeals to me.  This explains how to shift our own behavior, how to change a relationship, even how to implement change in the workplace.  When we put something new out there in the guise of something old, we allow our brains to absorb the “different” thru the lens of familiarity.  Change feels less disruptive when we can still anchor to something we’ve seen before.

So if you’ve been living in a mood of sadness, anxiety, or fear, for instance, the most comfortable route to happiness might be THROUGH — rather than away from — that other emotion!

Till next time…

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