It’s so simple, smelling things. I forget all the time, so on this Week’s Plan, the Stoker’s goal is go out of my way to smell something every day.
Wait… there, I just did today’s sniff. I dug a little finger hole in the dirt in the garden outside my office door and stuck my nose in it and breathed a bunch. It’s … hold on… wow, the initial whiff is anisey. I must have stirred up the roots of the nearby fennel plant. That passes immediately, followed by …. let me go sniff again … dirt, yeah, with undercurrents of sourish cedar, like the Brandt’s yard across from my mom’s house where I grew up. Mr Brandt was always planting flowers and grooming the lawn meticulously, and when we’d play football and skid through his beds, we’d kick up some of that cedar dirt smell.
Yes, odors trigger memories, but they also make them. They form the landscape of our lives’ stories.
Why not pay attention to how we paint the vistas grown inside our sinuses?
Yummy is the ‘Y’ of SMART & SEXY Goals.
There are two qualities of a SMART & SEXY goal that qualify it as Yummy, and smelling good is one of them. If you can make a goal so it smells good, there is a good chance you’ll enjoy it. One simple way is to bring an odor into the scene of the task at hand. Realtors know the power of cinnamon and chocolate chip cookies at open houses. If you work with great food all day, my nose is jealous of your nose. Woodworkers are a lucky bunch, too. Farmers, gardeners, of course. But what do you do if you work in an office? I sit at a computer a lot, and the coffee next to me provides some amount of yumminess, but this week I seek to expand the odiferousness of my Do List.
Here are a handful of my favorite non-food odors:
Turpentine. That’s the smell of makin’ art. Turpentine smells really good.
Freshly chewed fingernails. It’s a unique, chalky, dusty smell, a quiet cousin to singed arm hair.
My dog’s earwax. Couldn’t get enough of it. I got my daughter hooked on the stuff, too.
Nose breath. Before you kiss someone, just hang out and breathe in each other’s nose breath. My very first girlfriend had great nose breath. On our first date in a movie theater that was playing Good Guys Wear Black, a righteous Chuck Norris film†, just before my very first kiss ever her nose breath knocked me out.
Guitar strings. Especially when you wet them up with a little sweat and spit.
What are your favorite smells?
† Does anyone else remember Chuck’s awesome flying kick through the windshield of the moving car?