On my FB feed I read the story of a lovely woman I know who, when she went to pay for her groceries realized she’d brought the wrong card and didn’t have enough to cover all she wanted to buy. As she started to remove items, the woman in line behind her stepped forward and insisted on paying for what she couldn’t.
That act of kindness rippled out from my friend to everyone who read the story on her feed, inspiring all of us to step forward and give however we can to help someone else.
This holiday season, this day, this year about to begin, let kindness be the gift you share everyday with those you love, with strangers near and far.
From where I sit
face lit with the glow of my laptop screen
my fingers gliding across the keyboard
the soft chanting of Advent songs playing in the background
the steady welcoming hum of the furnace protecting me from the cold
lights flickering as cars cross the bridge carrying people into their day
misty air rising from the river flowing sluggishly between ice-clad banks
naked trees standing tall along its edges
stretched out branches frozen into awkward shapes
like children frozen in a game of Freeze Tag on a hot summer’s day.
sun kissed clouds stretch out above the tree tops.
river mist rises in ethereal white wisps gracefully flowing like a river through the air
This is the beauty of my morning.
This is the world that surrounds me.
This is my morning light moving from darkness into day.
I watch the lights flicker, the river valiantly fight against becoming ice
hear the music full of voices chanting and violins humming
feel the warm air wafting from the furnace beneath my desk
from where I sit
in awe
of the sun
lightening the dark surrounding nature’s delicate frozen dance
as I sit
breathing
in nature's bounty
soaking
all my senses full of its breath-taking beauty
This day is soaked in wonder, awe and magic.
Let it flow.
.
There was a time when Terry drove a semi back and forth across America, delivering livestock to rodeos and ranches across Canada and the US.
He loved his life. The freedom of the road. The camaraderie of truckers. The unstructured life.
For years, he didn’t need one place to call home. He had the wide-open road.
And then, life caught up with him. A gambling addiction. Alcohol. His body wearing down sooner than expected. No life-savings.
He ended up at a homeless shelter.
But even there, Terry didn’t succumb to the ennui of that place called ‘homeless’. He volunteered every day. His favourite role was carrying people up and down the elevators. He loved having that swipe pass. He liked the status and the opportunity to greet clients and visitors on every ride.
“I’m driving them where they need to go!” he’d joke.
Terry joked a lot. “Life is so bizarre you gotta laugh,” he’d say.
About once a week he’d ask me to marry him and then rescind the offer. “I don’t want to have to fight C.Cl” he’d joke.
Terry was small in stature. Big in heart and attitude.
When a cancer diagnosis befell him, he swore he was not going down without a fight.
He fought hard, but within months it was obvious, even to Terry, that the cancer was winning.
It was a few weeks before Christmas and Terry was failing fast. He decided to take one more kick at the can and for his Wishlist ask that year, he told the young woman interviewing him that all he really wanted before he died was to visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras. I’ve driven through that city countless times with my semi but never during Mardi Gras.
The young woman who was interviewing him for the Wishlist (an annual event sponsored by an amazing couple Dan and Jenny) had met Terry many times volunteering at the shelter.
She decided she was going to make his wish come true.
Terry’s health failed to fast for him to go, but here’s where the miracle of this season takes center stage.
One of the media outlets who came to support Terry’s wish was the Calgary Herald. The reporter was so moved by Terry’s story, he wrote a full page spread.
That article was read by a woman in Calgary who happened to know one of Terry’s brothers who lived in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Terry’s brother had been looking for him since he’d run away from home at the tender age of eight years old and was picked up by social services.
When his brother read the story, he showed his wife who promptly went on line, found the number for the shelter and called me.
I was there the day Terry and his brother were reunited.
It was one of the most beautiful moments I ever experienced.
And though Terry never did get to Mardi Gras, before he passed we held a party in his honour at a Cajun bar in town. Over 100 people turned up to wish him well.
“I don’t deserve all of this,” Terry insisted.
“You deserve so much more,” was the response from pretty well everyone there.
See, when Terry was first diagnosed he insisted he did not want to die anywhere than at the shelter.
I don’t want to be in a strange place surrounded by strangers he insisted.
We did everything we could to ensure he was comfortable, safe and well cared for. But in the end, hospice was the only answer.
I drove him to the hospice the day he moved in. His brother met us there and spent the next two weeks with him.
And the most miraculous part of it all is that when Terry took his last breath, he wasn’t amongst strangers. His brother was sitting at the side of his bed, holding his hand.
When I worked in an adult emergency homeless shelter, amidst the joy and laughter, the lights and decorations that adorn this time of year in the rosy glow of family gatherings and festive delights, the air was also filled with the sadness of loneliness and the heavy despair of homelessness.
For those without a place to call home, finding joy always came shrouded in the memories of joy lost, connections broken, family circles torn apart by poverty, addiction, violence and loss.
One year, we invited clients to share holiday messages to post on our website. I was always in awe of how excited those who participated were to have a chance to reach out to family and friends and let them know they were thinking of them and wishing them well.
One of those individuals was Zahir. His nickname was ‘Happy’ because he could always be counted on to lighten even the darkest moments with his laughter.
Zahir was diagnosed with a mental illness when his daughter was three. He was exiled from the family home and his community and began a long journey through homelessness.
He was in his 50s when we did a video story with Zahir one Christmas. We wanted to show the human side of homelessness. To help those who had never experienced it or judged the shelter and those experiencing homelessness, find compassion and understanding for those who used the shelter as their respite.
This video had an even more important purpose which would only be revealed several months later when I received a letter from a woman who had never given up searching for the father she’d lost when she was 3 years old.
As a child, she’d been forbidden from seeing or searching for, her father. As an adult, she made it her mission to find him. One of the things she did constantly, was search the websites of emergency shelters across Canada in the hopes of finding him. In her letter, she told me it was a miracle she stumbled across our video. She had started to give up hope of ever finding her father.
Zahir and his by-then 30-something daughter were reunited. At that reunion, Zahir got to meet his 2-year-old granddaughter and learned that he would be a grandfather again later that same year.
Zahir, despite his daughter’s requests he come live with them in another city, would not leave the shelter. It was the world he knew. And, though he never met his second grandchild, when Zahir passed away later that year, he was a very happy man. He had met the daughter he’d never lost hope of one day seeing again.
In the darkness of homelessness, Zahir held onto hope and loving-kindness.
May we all do the same.
This is the video that sparked the miracle of Zahir and his daughter’s reunion.
It is easy when I’m with my grandchildren to feel my heart breaking open wider and wider with each magical whisper of their voices, each lyrical laugh, each wide-eyed gaze they make.
Away from them, immersed in the mundane of daily living, I can sometimes forget that magic, wonder and awe are as present as the normal everyday things that fill my life.
It is in those moments of mundanity that I must pause, close my eyes, breathe and become present within the moment, present to the world around me, present with all that is within the moment.
All of it. The mundane. The exquisite. The superficial. The profound. All of it.
And when I do become present within it all, I awaken within the beauty and Love that is flowing constantly all around.
I am unlearning a lifetime of habitually believing that to regret is to sentence myself to a lifetime of always looking back, never moving on.
Dan Pink’s The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward is the impetus for my unlearning.
Now, I could be cheeky and try to turn the tables on his teaching by saying, “I regret reading this book! It’s making me change my mind about something I thought was one of those unalterable life truths.
Fact is, I don’t regret it at all, which in this case, is a good thing because I can’t unread what’s already read.
Regret makes us human. Regret makes us better, writes Pink.
I’d also add, it makes our journey richer – as long as we enlist our regrets to improve our future.
Like, when you say something to your best friend that is insensitive or snarky. Regret rides in fast (at least for most of us it does) compelling us to apologize and make amends.
Pink calls those ‘regrets of action’. The premise being, I have a chance to recalibrate the present by owning and making amends for what I’ve done to harm/hurt another.
The more challenging regrets, he expostulates, are ones of inaction. The roads not taken. The deeds not done.
Those are harder to course correct, and in more instances than not, according to Pink, seldom are.
Those are the ones we carry with us to the grave.
Which gives credence to the oft-quoted Mark Twain aphorism (which apparently he never said)
Letting go of the past is the decision to release ourselves from anger and regret while holding ourselves accountable for our own healing, journey, life..
Sadness for a loss, sorrow for the hurt we’ve caused others or felt ourselves, grief, they may remain, albeit more quietly than when fuelled by anger and regret, but they do not consume our thoughts nor govern how we move through each day.
It isn’t that we forget what happened. In fact, looking back, mining the past for lessons, gifts and value is, I believe, important and integral to our human journey. Unburdened by regret means, we choose to ease the sting out of the memories so that we can be free to look forward in anticipation of the infinite mysteries of tomorrow confident in our clear-minded, light-of-heart approach to the future.
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About The Artwork
Yesterday, I stepped into my studio thinking I’d begin working on some ideas I have for Christmas dinner nametags (I know. I know. I’m compulsive and like to get an early start. 🙂 )
The muse wasn’t interested in Christmas decorations. She was much more concerned about me taking care of my emotional well-being.
Which is what art-journalling is about for me. – Release. Balance. Breath. Space. Contemplation. Allowing. Accepting. Becoming.
I am in awe of the muse’s ability to create space for me to flow and release. Flow and release.
And in that release, allow whatever is within to appear. A signpost on my path.
Do I regret those almost five years I spent in an abusive relationship? I regret how painful my journey of transformation was to those I love. I regret the harm it caused everyone around me. In that regret comes my duty and accountability. To ease their pain, to create space for healing, I had to do the work to heal and reclaim my life.
No. I do not regret that journey. I know my decision to take it was from a place of great confusion, grief and pain. On that journeu, there are so many lessons that fuelled my personal journey into becoming. Me.
Ultimately, I lived through it. And that is a tremendous gift.
And, as I have just started reading Dan Pink’s The Power of Regret, I am still pondering, musing, and imbibing his words and ideas – so, I’ll probably be creating and writing more on this theme I’m sure! 🙂
Pink begins his book with the story of Edith Piaf and how this song became her anthem three years before her death. We played this song at our French/Indian-born mother’s Memorial Service March 3, 2020.
I stopped to ask if there was anything I can do to help.
She smiled through her tears, thanked me for stopping to ask and told me no. She was missing her past and no one could give that back to her.
I agreed and asked if I could give her a hug in the here and now. She quickly replied, Oh yes, please.
And so, two strangers stood heart to heart creating a bridge from the past to the future.
Sometimes, when the past is fresh in our minds and we feel burdened by its harshness, all we can do is mourn its absence.
Sometimes, when the heaviness of our mourning brings us down, and words cannot ease our pain, a stranger’s attention gives us hope that tomorrow will come.
That woman in the park had a story. In that moment, it wasn’t her story that mattered. What mattered most was that she was a human being in distress.
I couldn’t fix what was wrong. I couldn’t change the past.
All I could do was share ‘love’ to help her continue to keep moving towards the healing that comes when the past drifts far enough away, we no longer feel the urge to carry its pain, darkness and sadness.
In that moment, for her, I was an oasis devoid of memories of the past.
In that moment, for me, she was a beautiful reminder of the power of Love to heal.
You will take many steps today. If you’re following the science of healthy living, 10,000 will be your goal.
Those steps, as with every step you take throughout your life journey, will affect the quality of your life. Whether taken in resentment, anger, angst, or, harmony, joy, and love, their impact on your body, mind, health and journey will always be felt.
The steps matter and apparently, according to researchers, so do the number. 10,000 steps a day have value by improving heart health, body health, mind health. No matter the number, every step adds the quality of your journey as you age.
However, when you imbue each step with Harmony, Joy. and Love, you create a world of beauty all around and within you.
How we take each step, who we take each step with, what we imbue into our steps matters.
Make your’s count by creating beauty, joy, harmony and love with every step you take.
Dare Boldly 