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“List 15 Simple pleasures. Pick one and write about it.”
In no particular order:
- Cuddling in bed at night with your partner and whispering together before falling asleep.
- Hugging your child when they are fresh out of the bath and smell squeaky clean.
- A child, especially a child you love, laughing genuinely and with abandon.
- A warm cup of coffee on a cold morning.
- Summer rain. (especially if you have someone you love who will goof off with you in it)
- Sharing a smile with a stranger.
- Curling up with a trashy book just to chill.
- A warm bubble bath with no interruptions.
- Having a convo with someone you haven’t talked to in a long time.
- Curling up to nap on your bed in a pool of sunlight after spending the day swimming.
- Getting an unexpected letter or package.
- Clean fresh high thread count sheets on the same day you’ve pampered in the tub and shaved. (hehe)
- A nice long drive with no destination.
- Hearing an old song you used to love and haven’t heard in forever.
- Knowing that you have helped someone.
You’re driving your car, thoughts focused on the traffic, the to-do-list of things waiting for you at home, when suddenly the intro to a song begins to creep into your consciousness. Its familiar melody tinkles past your ear drums, a tiny smile tugs at the corners of your mouth. Your hand reaches out, all thoughts have simply jumped out of your head, nothing matters more than turning the song up. When the instruments are crashing around you in a cacophony of sound and you’re grinning like an idiot, the singer’s voice blaring through the mediocre speakers, the bass enough to make your chest cavity vibrate. The first chorus run is over, a deep breath during the guitar solo. Your brain scattering and trying to catch up, all the memories cascading through your head of times when you heard this song and something “important” was going on. When somehow this tune inserted it’s self into your very personal history. Much in the way that you can’t watch a certain cartoon without thinking of a childhood snack, this song, these chords, these words, are buried in the very being of who you are. It’s been so long since you’ve heard the song that you’d nearly forgotten it all together. All the little memories that go with it you never would have remembered without that trigger. Sure, you remember the day that your first kiss happened– vaguely. But now! Now with the trigger of the music behind it, your memory comes so much clearer, how the kiss was chaste or sloppy, how you didn’t know what to do with your hands or what you did do with them. You heard it again when you accepted your first really “good” job, and it reminded you of that kiss and you decried your innocence. How it came on as you drove away from that treasured friend’s home after just attending their wake. Many times this song has crept up in your life. Here you are, belting it out again, shaking your ass in the driver’s seat, a stupid smile plastered on your face. Maybe this time, innocence isn’t decried, it’s mourned. Perhaps this time you remember a great accomplishment or a major failure, a heartbreak or a windfall. Regardless of what the song inspires, what memories come forth, the true sentiment, is that an unexpected hearing of a forgotten song, is one of life’s simplest pleasures, that can have a lasting effect.