Groceries

Grocery shopping.  One of those chores that is simply required.  It is required if you want to eat.  If you don’t eat out at restaurants for each meal.  Eating every meal out sounds nice.  Until you do it on a regular basis.  We also live on a strict budget, so eating out every meal just is not part of our lives.

Not to mention we have a diet to adhere to.

Grocery shopping is just a part of life.

Around here it is sort of an adventure.  For the first six months I would not go to the local grocery store by myself.  They are renovating the store, aisle by aisle.  It is the slowest renovation of a grocery store that has ever happened.  It is an extremely well used store.  Always crowded.  It has particularly low prices.  Extreme couponers love, LOVE this store.  It is common to see a person with an entire cart full of one product and their coupon organizer sitting in the baby seat.  One time, the check out line was so long that is went across the front of the store, through the produce department, and all the way back into the meat department.  Every cart was full to overflowing.  It was overwhelming.

Back to grocery shopping being part of life.

You make a list.  You take it to the store.  You put the groceries in the cart.  You check off the list.  You pay the cashier.  You go home.  It is simple.

Have you ever noticed that we have the capacity to make enormous deals out of simple things?  Case in point, grocery shopping.  It can be so stressful!  The other customers can be rude or smelly.  The employees can be incompetent or just interested in chatting with co-workers.  The store can be lacking in basic necessities because the extreme couponer in front of me took every bottle of it.  It can be experienced as a ridiculous circus out to ruin my day.  I like to tell stories about these experiences, so I certainly remember and embed any drama.  The more drama I experience, the more stress I experience until I realize I am a wadded up ball of stress.

Really though, there is no need to derive stress from simple tasks.  Maybe I could just sit back and laugh.  Maybe I need to be more graceful to the people around me.  Maybe I’m learning a life lesson from the grocery store.

Maybe I just like to tell stories.