Changing it up

As school gets started, we all get into a groove. We wake up, we go to school or to work, we learn or work all day, we get home, do our homework, eat something, go to sleep and begin again the next morning. It can get rather monotonous day after day of the same basic schedule every day.

Even the people we interact with can become stale. Seeing the same people in the morning, the same people at lunch, the same people in the evening. It can get rather tedious.

This was happening to me today. It was a rather boring Monday, and everyone was going about their regular week. As I was walking to my lunch table, I saw a member of the staff at my school. I know her from around the building, and she is always friendly, but today she looked a little down. As I past her, I stopped and asked her how her weekend was.

Instantly, her face lit up and she smiled. She replied that she had had a nice weekend but it was short and asked me how my weekend had been.

This whole interaction took less than 20 seconds. There were no insightful conversations, no deep intellectual thoughts. But it was my favorite part of the day.

There is a concept that I learned in my time on youth group board called disrupting the pattern. This exercise teaches me to do things that one does not encounter on a regular basis to make some one's life a little nicer.

This experience with the staffer at school is a perfect example of this. I disrupted her monotonous routine by simply stopping and giving her the time of day. In truth, I did it for selfish reasons: It makes me feel as good to see someone else feel better as it does for them to feel good in the first place. But being able to make this woman's day a little more meaningful helped her to feel like she mattered to someone, and helped me to feel like I've made someone feel important to me.

So tomorrow, do something small to disrupt some one's monotony. Do something, even the most minuscule of actions to make someone feel good about themselves. Hopefully, the same will happen to you.