With homage to George Lucas, I’m borrowing his subtitle from Episode IV of Star Wars, because today 12-22-12 offers all of us a new hope. We’re still here. Alive, well and pretty much doing what we did the day before again, but that’s a choice not a sentence and I’m going to get right back to that point.
See it turns out after years of worry for some people, or wonder for others, the Mayans were wrong. Well, they were right in a sense, their calender did end and if they were here today, they would start a new one. But we didn’t experience a polar shift, deadly solar flares, fire raining from the sky, or a zombie apocalypse. You could make the argument that Eagles coach Andy Reid is a zombie. He’s been a dead man coaching since November and if you’ve heard him at a press conferences, then you know this guy is a zombie. And his play calling? Maybe that makes sense if you’re undead, but not if you’re among the living.
But let me get back to my point. Our lives continue and the world goes on, but are we going to live today and tomorrow like the yesterdays before it? We don’t have to, because its a choice not a sentence and that’s my point. Whether we thought the world was going to end or not, yesterday for good or for ill is gone, so how are we going to live today? Right now. Do we go to bed leaving our families, our communities, the world better than we found it? Do we see the face of our creator in all of his or her horrible disguises, as Mother Teresa used to speak of, and do we recognize the divinity of the person before us?
Today I have a new hope. I hope the first day of a new Mayan calender, which is supposed to be a time of peace and enlightenment, actually is. I hope every small act of kindness I perform or write about pushes us closer to a critical mass where kindness transforms itself from tenets we hear as children, to a natural behavior without reminders. Kindness is within all of us. The news and politicians tell us otherwise, but we are kind and like the winter solstice, darkness, which envelopes us from time to time eventually gives way to more light each and every day.
So today as the light grows I have a new hope. Today I hope I recognize humanity not just in my friends, but in the people who are not so pleasant to deal with. I hope that I find chances to spread kindness in small ways and if the opportunity presents itself, large ways too. I hope that by doing that, I can affect a positive change in the people around me and spread kindness like a healing salve and that others will take the time and effort to do the same. Its not that hard to do either. creating cold fusion from the atom is hard. Being nice, honoring the humanity in the people we meet is on the whole pretty easy. Who knows, if the Mayans were right we might just have begun a whole new epoch where this will be the norm, and if the Mayans were wrong, or it was all just a bunch of mistranslated Pre-Columbian graffiti, then maybe we can start our own period of peace and enlightenment, one kind act at a time.
Be Kind – Sean
99* Ways To Be Kind 