30 Quick Stories that Will Make You Think Differently
Written by Marc Chernoff

This morning I randomly received emails from three different blog subscribers (subscribe here) that basically said the same thing about three completely different articles: “The story you shared at the beginning of the post made me think differently.  Thank you.”

In light of this, I just spent an hour sifting through our blog archive and re-reading the intro stories to dozens of older posts.  And I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment of our subscribers.  Even when taken out of the larger context of a full blog post, these quick stories pack a thought-provoking punch.  So, I figured it would be a fun to re-share them with you today.  I hope you appreciate them as much as I do…

This morning, like he has every morning for the last decade, my 86-year-old grandfather picked a fresh wild flower on his morning walk and took it to my grandmother.  This morning I decided to go with him to see her.  And as he placed the flower on her gravestone, he looked at me and said, “I just wish I had picked her a fresh flower every morning when she was alive.  She would have loved that.”

Today, on my 47th birthday, I re-read the suicide letter I wrote on my 27th birthday about two minutes before my girlfriend showed up at my apartment and told me, ‘I’m pregnant.’  She was honestly the only reason I didn’t follow through with it.  Suddenly I felt I had something to live for.  Today she’s my wife, and we’ve been happily married for 19 years.  And my daughter, who is now a 21-year-old college student, has two younger brothers.  I re-read my suicide letter every year on my birthday as a reminder to be thankful – I am thankful I got a second chance at life.

After injuring my back, losing my job because of it, being evicted from our apartment, moving in with Laura’s parents, nursing my five-year-old through a nearly fatal bout of strep throat, I was stuck in a tragic rut for far too long.  And I was sitting on the front porch of my in-law’s house feeling sorry for myself, yet again, when my old college buddy called me crying and said, ‘Mel-Mel-Melissa, my baby girl, just died in a car wreck.’  And suddenly I felt like the lucky one.
 http://www.marcandangel.com/2015/08/19/30-quick-stories-that-will-make-you-think-differently/