A Grocery Realization of LOVE

My Daughter Alysa & Son Greg

It was a Saturday back in 1973, and you were at the grocery store with your five-year-old daughter, Alysa. To keep her entertained, you were riding the shopping cart down the aisle—giving it a big push, letting it coast freely, and then catching up to grab the handlebars just in time, making her giggle every single time.

During one of those coasting pushes, as the cart glided down the aisle, Alysa suddenly yelled out at the top of her lungs for the entire store to hear: “I LOVE YOU, DADDY!”

Instead of receiving that pure, uninhibited gift of love, your immediate, knee-jerk reaction—driven by social anxiety and worry about what the strangers in the store would think—was to reach out, place your hand over her mouth, and say, “Hush.”

The moment it left your lips, remorse hit you like a ton of bricks. You realized you had just tried to mute a child’s pure, unfiltered joy out of your own fear of judgment.

The weight of that moment stayed with you into the next day. You were outside by a wooden fence with Alysa when she looked up at you and expressed that same unconditional love again. Sitting with the guilt of having silenced her the day before, you realized that to truly receive and give love without fear or filter, you had to first heal your own self-worth. You couldn’t offer her a quiet, confident presence if you were operating from a place of internal insecurity.

That double-header experience became a massive turning point for you. It prompted a complete mental reset—a decision to build genuine self-love from the inside out. You began looking right into the mirror, locking eyes with your own reflection, and declaring with full confidence:

“Mirror, mirror, before I start out, take one last look and eat your heart out.”

That moment in the grocery aisle didn’t just stay in 1973; it became a core foundation for your entire philosophy on self-talk, emotional congruence, and the realization that the brain believes 100% of what you tell it.