“Be kind and merciful. Let no one ever come to you without coming away better and happier.” (Mother Teresa)We know life is not always a bed of roses and many of us get caught from time to time, by the thorny parts of life. Sometimes an angel in the guise of a friend, or loved one or even a complete stranger for that matter, comes along to rescue us or helps ease our burden by listening to our plight. It may not have been a grand gesture or a big thing that this person did or said but they helped us, when we needed it most.
How many times do we wish after a situation like this, that we had taken the time to thank that person properly for the kindness they showed us. Sometimes circumstances prevent us from showing our gratitude at the time and the opportunity of thanking them passes by and then before we know it, so much time has elapsed that the kindness has been all but forgotten and we have not made the effort to thank them. It can be tricky finding a way to thank complete strangers, but it is possible if we take the time and effort.
There is a lovely true story about Charles Plumb, who was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane as destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience.
One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”
“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.
“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!”
Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see, I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”
Plumb thought of the man hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.
Now, Plumb asks his audience, “Who’s packing your parachute?” Everyone has someone who provides what they need to make it through the day. Plumb also points out that he needed many kinds of parachutes when his plane was shot down over enemy territory-he needed his physical parachute, his mental parachute, his emotional parachute, and his spiritual parachute. He called on all these supports before reaching safety.
With family and friends, it is much easier to say thank you and to show your gratitude, yet surprisingly, many people forget to do this. Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. We may fail to say hello, please, or thank you, congratulate someone on something wonderful that has happened to them, give a compliment, or just do something nice for no reason.
I like to think that developing positive relationships is like a bank account. We all make deposits and withdrawals. The deposits are the things we do to help someone, like a simple gesture of cleaning the kitchen up or taking them out to dinner or lunch. Withdrawals are when we need a favour or help and the other person does this for us out of the goodness of his or her heart (or maybe a little prompting in the case of our spouse or partner). In positive relationships, it’s always best to be on the credit side – to have made more deposits than withdrawals and if this is not the case, then it is very unlikely that both people in the relationship are happy.
Showing kindness and gratitude seems to me to be a lost art, don’t you think? Reading and hearing horrible stories of the verbal or physical cruelty that humans can inflict upon one another at home, or in business, on the road and even in schools is appalling and it would be very easy to become despondent about the lost art of good manners, thoughtfulness and kindness. Whatever happened to the adage that our mothers constantly repeated to us, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? Yes, what has happened to the simple act of showing kindness?
One person can make such a difference to someone else’s life and believe it or not, to thousands of other people too. Ann Herbert may be an unknown name to you, but Ann started something big by one simple action. In 1982, in a restaurant in Sausalito, California, Ann wrote the following words on a place mat, “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Sounds simple and inconsequential don’t you think? Before long, it spread to bumper stickers and for some reason the simplicity appealed to many people and the practice of random acts on kindness became a world-wide phenomenon. From this one action grew mass action. True stories and books were written about random acts of kindness which has continued unabated since that fateful day in 1982 when one person made a simple but remarkable statement.
I am in awe of the number of ordinary heroes within our midst. Yes it might seem like an oxymoron to talk about ordinary heroes because a hero after all is someone venerated for heroic acts like putting their life at risk in order to save someone else’s life or many lives. Ordinary heroes, on the other hand, are more common but in my mind, every bit as heroic in the real sense of day to day living.
She or he is the kind of person that gets on and does a job without any fuss. Often they are the first to put up their hand for a new task, nothing is too much trouble and it seems as if they infinite time to go around. Now we know of course, that they have busy lives too, but somehow these people magically make time for other people and put their own needs second. If you talk to such a person they will tell you that they get more out of life by helping someone else and showing kindness to others, than if they had just gone on with their own lives. Debi Mazar puts it this way:
“A hero is somebody who is selfless, who is generous in spirit, who just tries to give back as much as possible and help people. A hero to me is someone who saves people and who really deeply cares. “
There are so many people around us who are ordinary heroes. Let's celebrate these people by showing our appreciation for their actions and kind words. We all benefit by showing gratitude and not only do we make someone's day by this simple thing, but we feel better about ourselves too.
“Appreciation is a wonderful thing: it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.” (Voltaire)
Karon Graham
