#12/100: Where’s Your Cart?

I think the secret to happiness is keeping control of your grocery cart.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You can be inspecting the bananas or deciding how much more broccoli you can really bear to eat and that cart can just amble away. If it’s empty and abandoned too long, someone else might put their bananas in it and then it will be lost to you.

Worse is your cart rolling away after you’ve put all your bags in the car. You turn around to roll your cart to its tidy little pen with all the other carts and it’s rolling across the parking lot, the wind at its back. Then you must decide. Retrieve it or leave it? How far will you go to do the right thing?

Mood control is such a constant challenge and I often wonder why. My mood is like an orchid that folds up at the slightest chill when I want it to be like a sunflower, big and bright even in a thunderstorm.

So what I wish for is maybe not happiness but simply sturdier moods. I would like to be less voluble, a word I picked up when I was an advocate for a teenager girl in foster care. The therapists and case workers would use it to describe her unpredictability, profanity, and unwillingness to cooperate. It seemed to me that she was mirroring the chaos in her life, most of it engineered by the legion of helpers, me included, enlisted to make her life better. Her jumpy moods actually made the ridiculousness of our efforts to fix her more apparent. Hers was the truer read on her situation, that’s for sure.

I can’t see any reason why my cart rolls away. It’s not in reaction to any particular thing, no mirroring going on here. It seems random, barometric, like one day the leaf will be green and the next day start to brown on one edge. I don’t get it.

I am keeping better track of my cart though. That’s something.

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If you’re wondering what #12/100 means, it’s this: I’m writing 100 essays in 100 days. This is the 12th day. Tomorrow will be #13 and is going to be cheery. Such is the nature of moodiness.