Life is fragile. My father died at the age of thirty three. The son of a friend died when he was only seventeen. My grandfather lived to be one hundred eight. I have lost dear friends and cousins who would have been my age had they lived. My mother is gone as well as all of my aunts and uncles. My husband seems to learn of the death of a classmate with great regularity now. Most of us knew someone who died from Covid. We read about people taken from this earth by mass shootings and wars. While we know that death is inevitable we are always stunned when we hear of it. We are all too often filled with regret that we did not take the time to share our feelings of love and gratitude with the people that we knew and loved before they were gone.
Time is relative in a psychological way. There are intervals when the days are unbearably slow. We trudge through them exhausted and frazzled. Other moments seem to pass so quickly. The often frenzied routines and demands of living keep us focused on surviving. Before we know it we realize that we have missed that opportunity to share our feelings and our joys with the people who mean much to us and even with the people that we simply pass in our daily dealings.
I try to write a tribute to friends and family members who have died. My blogs about them seem to touch the hearts of even those who never knew them. People tell me that I have a knack for describing and praising the souls of my departed loved ones. Somehow I wish that I might be able to tell their stories before they die. I think of how wonderful it would be for them to know how their very existence impacted me and the many people who knew them. I wonder why we humans so often only open our hearts when someone has died. It would be quite lovely if we were to take just a few minutes each day to tell the living how much they mean to us.
I recently saw a post on Facebook that related the story of a math teacher who gave her students a list with the names of every member of the class. She instructed them to write something positive about each person on the roster. At the end of the exercise she collected the papers and then spent days creating a letter for each student that listed the compliments from their fellow students. Then she gave those praise letters to each of her pupils.
Years later one of the students had died and she attended the funeral for him. There she was reunited with many of her former students. She learned that each of them had treasured the affirmations from their fellow classmates and returned to read them whenever they began to doubt themselves. They thanked the teacher for giving them such a tremendous gift.
One Christmas I randomly selected a few of my greeting card recipients to receive an earnest letter outlining what they meant to me. I suppose that we are so unaccustomed to receiving such a thing that many of them contacted me immediately to out of concern that I must surely be sick or depressed or in trouble of some kind. They could not imagine receiving the thoughts from my heart just because I wanted them to know how important they were to me. Somehow my gift of love seemed to embarrass or confuse them.
I understood in that moment that if I were to ever do such a thing again I would need to preface my love letter by explaining it’s purpose. Since then I have been careful about revealing my feelings of gratitude without a clear clarification of my intentions. I suppose that we humans are so reserved and maybe even unsure of ourselves that we wonder what is behind compliments. We tend to feel a bit uncomfortable whenever someone heaps us with praise. We find it difficult to believe how many people we have touched simply by being ourselves. We live in a world of hucksters who use flattery to take from us. We keep our defenses at the ready in case someone is attempting to take advantage of us.
It is often the smallest of encounters with our fellow humans that transform us. We may only know them for a brief moment in time and yet a seemingly small sacrifice from them will change us in positive ways forever. We should all be aware of the power that we have to realign the trajectory of a person’s day or even an entire lifetime. Every word that we utter and action that we take matters, so why not use that power to build people up rather than to ignore them or tear them down?
The world is filled with souls working away just to make it through another hour or another day. Nobody should be invisible to us. Even the surly clerk who makes our interactions difficult will no doubt smile if we find something nice to say to her/him. Each of us enjoy those moments when we realize that the work we have done in our lives actually meant something to someone. No paycheck gives us as much joy as a single sincere compliment. Such comments are especially important when they randomly arrive when we are in difficult times.
I’m going to try harder to showcase some very important people who made me the person I am today. I have spoken of my mother and father and grandparents quite often but there are so many others who changed me for the better. I hope to let them know the gifts of their being that taught me how to love others as well as myself. It will be one of my goals this year to let them know how much I have appreciated them.
All It Takes Is A Little Love 