CHOICES SHAPE YOUR FUTURE
By Judith Ashton
Happy New Year to one and all. New Year always feels like a time for new beginnings and resolutions, and like most I start off with great intentions. This year I’m asking myself, how can I contribute to making the world and my community a better place? How can I step up, what does the world need from me right now? This is a big question, however, I realised that the answers are not that big. They are in fact quite small and that even little things accumulate and can grow in size and effect. A tiny pebble thrown into a pond makes big ripples.
As I look around, I see rampant individuality, lack of tolerance, divisiveness, lack of happiness, loneliness, isolation, lack of acceptance of self and other, dissatisfaction and so on. In these turbulent times, our world needs more love, empathy, compassion and generosity of spirit. These qualities are part of our human spirit. They are not to be bought and sold. They are neither commodities nor expensive, yet they are priceless, and these most valuable assets are stored in the vaults of all of our hearts. If we don’t express them we become insular, narcissistic and our hearts become hardened. The more we express our qualities, the more we develop as wise human beings. The more we realise how enriched we are by these invisible assets.
Someone once said, “Walk a mile in my shoes.” We can all look at others and be judgemental or critical and as Gabor Mate so eloquently reframes the question, “What’s wrong with that person? Into, “What happened to that person?” The very shift in perspective can create compassion and empathy.
So, here are some ways that we can experiment with to help ourselves feel happy and that spread a little happiness out into the world. However busy you might think you are, just pause, stand tall, take a couple of deep breaths and let a big smile radiate out from your centre! See, just that changes something indefinable, a bit of a warm glow? Perhaps a slight change of mood? Whatever… some subtle shift of energy.
A lot has been written about the myriads of benefits we experience by what are called “small random acts of kindness”. The feelgood factor is immeasurable. When we help another person, we help ourselves… there’s a shift from selfish to selfless. The act of helping is always mutual.
When we look at another person, (Remember that question,” what happened to… ?” ) we never know what they are feeling or what they are going through so it costs nothing to smile or say, “Good Morning”. People are so out of touch and disengaged when they are looking at their phones. Look up, look around and let’s start looking at and, out for each other. Let’s start to take notice of our fellow human beings. Let’s make eye contact when we speak. Reaching out doesn’t even have to be verbal, a smile, a wave shows you are making connections.
Try it, say, “Thankyou” to the person in the supermarket checkout or the person cleaning the public toilets. Tell them how much you appreciate what they are doing and that it’s important work. Get a bunch of flowers for the neighbour you heard was not well. It’s not difficult to do these small acts and it can just change someone’s day.
Gratitude is another thing that we need to cultivate… I was buying a new set of windscreen wipers recently and the guy serving me said, “There’s nothing worse than bad wipers!” I burst out laughing… and I replied, “ I can think of a million things far worse!” and in that moment we both realised just how lucky we are…However bad it might seem, we can all think of at least 10 things to be grateful for. Try it. I’m grateful for the obvious things in my life but think of 40 more…. Your flush toilet, your daily shower, fresh air, clean water… so we also need to stop complaining and count our blessings as life can change very unexpectedly, and we shouldn’t take things for granted e.g.: people close to us, peace, freedom, health, free speech, our civil rights etc.
Gratitude and random acts of kindness are all things that we can cultivate and the more we do so, the happier we become. These are values that can change the world and ones we need to teach our children.
