At Starbucks, where I am a big bad barista (lol), we serve several teas with cool names like "Awake", "Calm", "Refresh" and so on. Their names are supposed to indicate their result. "Awake", being a black tea has caffeine that is a good morning tea to wake you up. "Calm" has chamomile, and is a great tea to calm you down before bedtime or any other time. "Refresh" is our herbal infusion that is a refreshing cup for anytime of day.
During the holidays, we serve a wonderful tea Starbucks calls "Joy". Joy tea is a combination of Black, Green, and Oolong teas that only come around at Christmas time. Looking at those tea bags today at work, it got me thinking....can you CHOOSE Joy? Can you choose your emotions?
We often think that life happens TO us, but can we MAKE life happen? Is the way we feel determined solely by what is happening to us? Do we have a choice? I think, the answer is YES. We do have a choice.
I have watched people who have everything they could ever want be the most miserable individuals in the world, while the poor family who has just enough to eat, sit out on their meager porch, playing their guitars, and singing praise to God for their many blessings.
Sometimes, we cannot do much about our situation. What we can do, we do. Then when we can do no more about the situation, we can STILL do something about how we feel and think about it. We can CHOOSE to be miserable, and we can CHOOSE to find joy.
Maybe you can't buy REAL joy in a cup, but you can choose to feel joy. Maybe Starbucks doesn't sell "Misery" tea, not only for marketing reasons, but because misery seems so easy for us to conjure up ourselves.
Isn't it time to change that? Can we make Joy the norm and not the exception? Maybe we can at least try.
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