Quick. Picture one of your favorite photographs of yourself.
What makes you love it?
If you are anything like me, it’s likely not a formal shot that someone made you stand in front of the fireplace or house to take (in fact, if you are anything like me, you loathe those kind of pictures. But that’s not what this particular post is about so I’ll shut it on that). It’s probably a picture that captured you in a moment, and it’s the way the picture captures the moment you are in that thrills you.
One of my favorite pictures captures me at 23 in the midst of my first year of teaching and coaching. In it, I am lying across a desk in my classroom, hamming it up with “my girls” as we wait for a bus to take us to a rainy away soccer game. My cheeks are pressed into round apples, my mouth is pulled into a Joker-like grin, my teeth are biting the tip of my tongue (that quirky thing I do when I am at my most joyful), my royal blue hair is slicked back into a pony tail. Yep, you read that right. My royal blue hair.
Soccer wasn’t a big sport at the inner-city school where I taught, and we often took a beating in our games. Wanting to inspire our girls, the other coach and I told them we’d color our hair blue (the school color) if they won a game. As the season came to a close, they did so we did.
If I had to choose just one picture to show what impact teaching and coaching had on me, it would be this picture. In just one shot, it shows that I was willing to go all out as an educator, shows my playful side, shows what joy my work brought me.
Today, I want you to take a note from Day 88 in Beautiful You and identify a picture in your life that shows you content and satisfied. What are you doing in that picture? Tell us about it. And then, if you can, put it somewhere where you can spy it on a regular basis, giving you an infusion of that joy and satisfaction all over again.
