You're going to be. Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. When I go to work every day, I have this beautiful town that I get a drive

through called Laguna Beach. It's right along the water. It's an artistic community, and it truly is a lovely place to visit if you ever come to Southern California.

Just the other day I stopped there to go for a walk with my dog Einstein.

It was a beautiful day and there are many other people there enjoying the beautiful weather and day.

As I was walking, there was a man walking towards me and we were going to collide if both of us didn't change our direction.

So I started moving to the right and he started moving to the left.

Though we weren't going to collide, we were still quite close to each other when we passed and right when we did

pass each other he took his shoulder and slammed it pretty hard into my shoulder.

My first emotional reaction was one of shock and a little bit of anger because I thought,

wow, why did he do that?

I could tell by the way that he was dressed that either he was a homeless person or pretty close to it.

I had politely smiled at him as I often do when I passed someone and I was working hard

at getting out of his way.

So I knew I hadn't done anything wrong, anything that clearly upset him.

So what I did was, I turned around and said,

Are you okay? I'm sorry I didn't mean to bump into you.

And he just nodded, but he could tell that he knew that I knew what had happened.

And it ended. It was over, nothing escalated, and I just went on my way. But I thought

about it afterwards. I know what most people would have done in that situation. They would

have yelled at him saying,

hey, why did you do that? What's wrong with you? Hey, what's wrong? Come on, knock it off.

Things like that. And when we do this, what we're doing is we're letting that person's bad day become our bad day.

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