What Made You Smile Today?

This has been a very difficult week around here.  Our community has gone through a lot and has responded heroically.   But my message for today (and yes, there's a message here pretty much every week) is something that you've might not heard yet from all this.

I'll get back to that in a minute.  First I'm going to complain about getting old but not in a way that you might expect.

It just seems that I'm losing a lot of friends lately.  I was away this summer when my buddy Skip Murrin died.  If you never knew Skip, then you missed one of our great personalities.  You had to smile when around The Skipper.

Just this week I got word that Tommy Wilson died suddenly.  A gentle, kind man, we first became friends when we co-coached a T-ball team at Maryville Little League.

Another Blount County resident that you probably didn't know was Dr. Bob Bowman who died a couple of weeks ago.  Dr. Bowman, a renowned orthopedic surgeon, moved here from Jacksonville when he retired.  His gardens and orchards on a ridge near Friendsville were quite something until his health started getting the best of him.

And then there was Officer Moats.

I guess if you live long enough, you're going to see things like this.

Lest you think this is going to continue on a morbid note, let me assure you it is not.  In fact, what I want you to do is to see the joy in life, to smile more, to think about the good things in your own life.

I'm pretty sure that's what friends and family would want you to do.  So let me steal from a variety of sources and offer some questions you should ask yourself each day to help you lead a more positive life and get through tough times.

Did I learn something new today?  You've got to always move forward.  I've always heard that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  Well this old dog keeps trying to learn new tricks every day.  But you need to carefully cultivate where you search.  Social media and Fox News are not places where you want to go to learn more about life.

Did I make others feel better about themselves in some way?  Maybe this is cliché day but Maya Angelou once said that "people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Did I do something good today for somebody and they had no idea where that good something came from?  Those are our greatest gifts.

Do I surround myself with positive people?  I don't want to be around people that are negative all the time.  I want to be around people like Tim Teague, who seems perpetually positive.

Do I allow negative thoughts to dominate my day?  If you are an athlete, you've got to embrace this one.  If one of our kickers misses a kick or a receiver drops a pass, I will often go to them and tell them that the only one that counts is the next one.

I have a really great friend in another state who I overheard talking to her young son one day.  She asked him "what made you smile today."  What a wonderful question (I happen to think she must be a terrific mom too).

So when the burdens of the day seem to weigh you down, when you're grieving or dealing with illness or the many things that we encounter that make life downright hard sometimes, let the legacy of a smile and a kind word from those friends and family that may have passed on be your guide.  Allow that to be their legacy to you.

So, what made YOU smile today?