Hugs from a sweet little girl can erase stress after long work day

By David McElroy · April 23, 2019

My weary muscles ached as I walked into the restaurant for dinner Tuesday evening. I was later than usual because I’d been shooting pictures to prepare for a new real estate listing. I was hot and tired and cranky.

And then Isabella saw me.

She was playing with a couple of other little girls when she saw me, but she dropped them and came running to me. She grabbed my leg to hug me and then reached up for me to pick her up. I reached down and lifted her tiny body and she wrapped her arms around my neck.

All of a sudden, I felt very different. I had energy. I felt happy. I felt as though I must be pretty special for this beautiful little blonde lady to be so happy to see me.

Isabella is the 4-year-old daughter of one of the managers at the restaurant. She’s seen me only a couple of times before, but she accepted me quickly. The first time her mother introduced her to me, she spontaneously ran over and reached out for a hug.

Maybe she loves everybody, but I like to believe Isabella just thinks I’m special. And that makes me happy, so please don’t tell me otherwise.

We sat at my MacBook and I showed her pictures of my cats and dog. After looking at a few dozen pictures, she would call out the name of whichever one whose picture I opened. She loved them all and she would gleefully say their names as she recognized them.

We made silly pictures in PhotoBooth. We made a couple of videos in QuickTime. (See a short example below.) But she kept coming back to the animals.

After about half an hour, I told her I had to leave, but she told me I couldn’t. She held on and said she wanted me to stay. I tickled her a bit to get her happy again before I told everybody goodbye and slipped out.

I live only about a mile from there, so I went home and got Lucy. I knew Lucy would enjoy a car trip and I thought Isabella would be happy to meet Lucy.

When I got back, I went and asked her mother whether it was OK for Isabella to come outside and meet Lucy.

“Oh, yeah,” she said with a wave of her arm. “I trust you. I know you’ll take care of her.”

So Isabella came outside and met my furry girl who probably weighs twice what she does. They were both shy at first. But then Lucy licked Isabella’s face and the little blonde girl laughed and put her arms around Lucy’s neck.

And then it was time for me to go. I asked another employee to come out and hold Isabella’s hand to come back inside, but Isabella cried and said she didn’t want to go back inside. She wanted to go with me and see the cats.

But then she was pulled just inside the door. She stood there looking forlorn — as little children can do so well — and she waved. It wasn’t the adult kind of wave in which the hand moved back and forth. It was the child’s wave. Her hand was like a little fist held up as she opened and closed it.

I waved and Lucy and I walked back to the car.

“Love you,” she called out loudly to us through the slightly open door.

I still need rest. I still need sleep. It was still a long day. But I felt happy. I felt special. Because a little blonde girl loved me.

Hugs and love from a child make powerful medicine.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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