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We have all been there. A rotten day. A day
you grudgingly embark into feeling bad and leave feeling worse.
You wake up late, leap out of bed and in the process put a
splendid kink in your neck. You then leave the shower curtain
outside the tub and flood the bathroom. Then you burn the toast.
Go outside to find another ding in your car door from some
unscrupulous idiot in the Superstore parking lot. You have a few
narrow misses on your way to work. Work is a disaster, you end up
re-booting more than a champion CFL punter. You are surrounded by
people oblivious to your agony with moods as foul as yours.
Nobody has a kind word to say and nothing you do seems to work
out. By the end of the day you are exhausted, disheartened, and
ready to sell your house and family and live in solitude in a log
cabin in northern BC. In a day like this, how can you ever hope
to find a glimmer of inspiration from anything?
Take that same day. Same kinks, same burnt
toast, same computer problems. But with one difference. You are
walking out of your building, feeling horrible, when directly in
your path you see a very, very old lady looking at you. You try
your best to avert her glance, but she keeps looking at you and
you are drawn toward her. As you approach she continues looking
directly into your eyes. She is a very old lady, her face a
roadmap of wrinkles and character and true beauty. Before you
know it you are standing right in front of her and she reaches
out, touches your arm and says in a surprisingly young voice, “You
remind me of one of my children, how handsome you are! You take
care now.” And then she walks away.
How do you feel now? Like going home,
calling your mom, and telling her you love her? Or calling your
brother or sister just for no reason and reminiscing about a
childhood event? This is true inspiration, and true inspiration
is often the result of simple human kindness. Human kindness.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, it is.
How often do we get so caught up with life
that we forget about life itself? All these people around us who
are people, not just objects we bump into. And every second of
every day, you have the ability to make a difference in these
peoples’ lives, just by showing simple kindness! Human kindness
is the simplest, most economical, and most amazingly powerful
method we have to make a difference in peoples’ lives!
I have been fortunate enough to travel to
many places around the world and have visited a lot of inspiring
physical places. The Amazon jungle, Machu Picchu, the pyramids of
Egypt, the Himalayan mountains, the Taj Mahal, the glaciers of
Greenland, the great barrier reef of Australia. But my strongest
memories are not of these places; they are of the people I met and
the kindness that was shown me. And I was inspired by these
people to travel even more, learn as much as possible, be more
adventurous, be more accepting and, most importantly, be less
scared of human contact.
Aesop, whose fables we know well, in The
Lion and the Mouse, wrote:
“No act of kindness, no matter
how small, is ever wasted”
My wife and I lived in Santo Domingo of the
Dominican Republic for a couple years and we stayed at an
apartment/hotel complex that was run by a wonderful lady named
Dona Carmen. One of her staff members was an old Haitian man
named Carlos. Now Carlos was born in Haiti but had moved to Santo
Domingo when he was a young man, and being a Haitian living in the
Dominican Republic is not easy as there is much racism and
resentment, but you would never know this from Carlos. He was
quiet, genuine and a man of very few words. In fact, when he did
speak, his Spanish was so fast and full of slang that I could
hardly understand a thing. The one thing I did understand was
when I saw him every morning I would say, “Buenos dias Carlos,
como estas?” His stone-faced response was always, “Bieeeeeeen”,
which means ‘Fine’.
Now Carlos would often come up to our
apartment to fix and check on things. And my wife and I had a
small turtle named Speedy. Every time he came up he would ask to
see the turtle then would stand there talking to it in his Spanish
that neither of us could understand. He would also like to feed
him turtle food. One time we had planned a trip and were going to
be away for a week. Carlos heard that we were planning a trip and
one day when we were leaving for work he, looking very embarrassed
and humble, asked if we had anybody to look after the turtle. We
said no, and he offered to do the job. When the day came to leave
we brought speedy down in his little turtle oasis with his bottle
of turtle pellets to give Carlos the briefing. We said, it’s
important that you only give him four pellets in the morning and
four at night, he will eat more if you give it to him but it’s not
good for the turtle to eat that much. Carlos said, “Bueeeeeno”
and we left.
We returned a week later to the aparthotel
and were greeted by a smiling Carlos holding Speedy up in his
tank. We asked him how it went and he said “Bieeeeeen”. I asked
him if he just gave him four pellets in the morning and four at
night. With an unusual look on his face he nodded a very
uncertain yes and handed me the tank. There must have been a
hundred and fifty uneaten pellets scattered over the bottom of the
tank and one extremely bloated looking turtle.
There is a comedian/activist/writer named
Margaret Cho who had an interesting piece on her web log:
“Sometimes when we are generous
in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone else's life
forever”
Backpacking through the French countryside I
had the opportunity to spend a few days working at a grape orchard
near the town of Epernay. There was a crew of about 20 people,
among them a chain-smoking Brazilian, a budget conscious American,
a homeless German and his dog, and the rest French gypsies that
followed the various harvests around the country. One of these in
particular was a tall, rough, extremely intimidating looking man
who I avoided completely. There was something about him that I
didn’t like and I was uncomfortable being around him. One night,
after the work was finished, the whole crew was fed a dinner of
bread, cheese, and copious amounts of wine, which is the advantage
of working at a wine farm. I was drinking with some of them when
I decided to go outside to the campfire to be by myself. I wasn’t
there for long when the large ugly Frenchman whom I had so far
successfully avoided came out, walked over and sat beside me. If
it wasn’t for the wine raging inside of me I would have been
petrified. He sat down and started talking to me in French. I
knew enough French to tell him that I didn’t understand French,
but he waved me off and continued talking, with a jug of wine in
his hand, which he passed to me intermittently. He sat and told
me a story and it was one of the most heartwrenching stories I
have ever heard, even though I didn’t understand what he was
saying. As he passionately told his story, his eyes welled with
tears as he spoke, and I could do nothing but nod and listen. As
he spoke, he took a wallet out of his pocket, opened it, removed
an old tattered picture, and handed it to me. It was a picture of
him and his wife on their wedding day. He looked so happy. At
that point I understood that his story had been about his life,
how he had been happily married, then lost his wife and ended up
living as a gypsy.
Why did he decide to tell me his story? I
don’t know. But I do know that he changed my life that night, and
I have felt inspired by that moment ever since. Inspired by an
act of human kindness.
In the memoirs of Quaker and missionary
Stephen Grellet he writes:
“I expect to pass through this
world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any
kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now;
let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way
again.”
I worked for some time in Karachi, Pakistan.
When I say Pakistan the images that fill our minds are terrorist,
atomic bomb, military government, Kashmir war. What sort of
inspiration could we hope to find there? Human kindness. In the
office in which I worked there was a external contractor hired to
provide coffee and this contractor in turn had staff. One boy in
particular, was probably around 15 years old, with piercing blue
eyes and straight black hair, didn’t speak a word of English and I
didn’t speak a word of his language, Urdu. I used to go for
coffee breaks and he was always the one working at that time. The
boy’s job was to spoon some instant coffee into a little Styrofoam
cup, then add water, sugar and powdered milk as required. He had
these little teaspoons he used to add the various ingredients. I
would walk up to the counter, point to a coffee cup, using the
universal body language which always seems to transcend cultures,
no matter where you are in the world. He would pick up a cup, dip
his spoon into the jar of instant coffee then carefully tap the
spoon against the inside of the jar so that the amount of coffee
was perfectly level with the top of the spoon and not heaping. He
would then drop the coffee into the cup and hand to me. I would
look in the cup and the miserly amount of coffee, look at him and
he would always be smiling back at me with this amazing
expression. I would then hand the cup back to him and indicate
that I wanted more coffee powder. He would look over at his boss
who would look at me then give him the “special nod” and he would
dip the teaspoon back in the instant coffee, get a heaping amount,
then tap against the jar until there was nothing remaining but a
few grains of coffee, which he would dump in the cup and hand back
to me with an even wider grin. We went through this routine day
after day, and I never ceased to feel inspired by how two people
who couldn’t communicate through language could share such a joke
time after time.
I saw many inspiring things in Pakistan but I
will never forget the coffee boy with the wide grin and sense of
humour. That young man inspired me and continues to inspire me to
his day and I’m sure he doesn’t even know it.
The little things we do can offer so much
inspiration to others, and we can gain so much inspiration by
putting ourselves in a position to take advantage of human
kindness. Do these things happen only in exotic locations around
the world? Of course not!
Remember that rotten day? I had one of those
last week – by the end of the day I was not feeling particularly
enthusiastic but my wife did convince me to go for a walk after
dinner so we took our little baby and went down to a local
restaurant for a coffee. As we were sitting there, me feeling
sorry for myself, the door of the restaurant opened and in walked
the “can lady”. I had seen her dozens of times in our
neighbourhood pushing a shopping cart around collecting cans and
bottles to take to the recycling depot for money. She walked in,
took off her mitts and sat in the booth behind us. We had our
coffee, and as I sat complaining to my wife about my day, whinging
about this and that, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see
that the can lady standing there, smiling, with her hand open
presenting four beautiful blue pendants. “Take one,” she said,
“for your baby.”
An unselfish, generous act of human kindness
when I least expected it and most needed it. I left the coffee
shop knowing that a stranger had just turned a day gone wrong into
one that I will never forget.
As we leave this room, remember, that little
act of kindness you show to somebody today just might change their
life forever. |
