I was inspired to write this post by Moonbeam McQueen and her Blue Buffalo post. A really nice man did a really nice thing at the best possible time and Moonbeam wrote a lovely post about it. I encourage everyone to go read it.
Moonbeams’s post was simmering nicely in the back of my brain yesterday while I was having lunch with my sis and my niece. My niece loves to dig through my purse – she has been doing it since she was a toddler and for the life of me I can not imagine why. My purse must be so boring compared to her Mom, the glamour Queen’s! I keep a notepad in my 
purse to help combat fibrofog. So often I have a great idea, so great in fact that I can’t imagine I would ever forget it, but if I don’t write it down, WHOOSH, it is gone. Well my niece came across something I had written down and then proceeded to never look at again, so of course I had completely forgotten about it. What she found was a list of three acts of kindness that happened to me during our trip to Hawaii. I had written them down with the intention of blogging about them. They were such simple gestures, but gestures that at the time really affected me.
The first item on my notepad was “girl who wiped sand off me.” It was after snorkeling one day. I had to quit early because I was starting to flare-up, so I just sat on the beach and watched my husband tooling around in the ocean. When he had his fill we got up to leave and I went up to the outdoor showers to rinse the sand off my legs. My flare had intensified sitting in the sun and I was having trouble reaching the backs of my calves to wipe the sand away. That is when the sweetest teenaged girl rinsing off next to me just reached over and started wiping my legs off for me. She looked up at me and smiled and said “there you go,” and then walked away. I was so touched. I mean I am a thirty-something-year-old with the appearance of a healthy person. I have no idea if she realized the level of my pain and reached out to help me, or if she is just simply that sweet, but she will never know how much she helped me in that moment. I know I thanked her, but I could not have expressed how much she really helped me.
The second thing I had written down was “passenger who helped me with my jacket.” This is something I have seen happen before in crowded spaces, like on airplanes – one passenger trying to remove their jacket while contorting their body so as not bump or punch anyone in the process. It is nice to see someone reach out a hand and help. It is especially nice for someone who suffers from chronic pain to be helped in those situations. When the passenger across the isle reached out to help me I wanted to hug her. Traveling is so painful with Fibromyalgia, and again because I look “healthy,” she was reaching out to me as she would anyone else, with a simple gesture of kindness.
The final thing I had on my list was the “shuttle driver who made sure our car would start.” My husband and I had an adventure and a half getting home from that vacation. When we arrived in San Diego in the wee hours of the morning we were picked up by the friendliest shuttle driver and dropped off at our car. He had no idea of what we had been through, but he sat and waited to make sure our car would start before he gave us the “thumbs-up” and drove away. Such a simple thing really, but so thoughtful, because truly, after everything else that had occurred, we were half expecting a dead battery.
I am so happy my niece found this list and reminded me of why I made it a point to write these down. I see kindness everyday; people holding doors for each other, bending over to help someone pick up their dropped change, giving another driver the right-of-way. What we don’t know though is the lasting impact a simple gesture of kindness can have. Even though I had not thought about these incidents in the weeks since I wrote them down, in the moment they happened, I was extremely grateful to each one of them, on a level none of them could have realized. I hope you all experience at least one unexpected act of kindness this holiday season.
It’s funny you mention this, I have actually started writing a book simply about acts of kindness that I have seen or that people have done for me. After my diagnosis of FMS, I just started noticing these acts more, probably because they ended up helping me so much more than they did before. It was in this process that I realized I can do the same thing. I started trying to do these acts of kindness for the people around me. It is so amazing how much my spirits were lifted when I would do something simple and sweet for someone. Something as simple as a smile, which is something I must say I didn’t do very often, not maliciously, but because I was very shy, could turn around the whole day of someone else. Then I would get these feelings that my one act of kindness would help that person feel giving to others and then there would be this wonderful domino affect of kindness. Grandiose I know, but no harm can come from being kind. If I kept my focus on this, I found that I could, at times, lessen my pain because my stress would evaporate and that would stop a flare-up in a lot of cases.
Grandiose yes, and I love it! Small little acts of kindness can actually have a significant and positive ripple effect. There is a commercial like this that I have seen recently and it is lovely. And pain sometimes is caused by emotions, so it makes sense that if you improve your mood your pain will lessen. You are very thoughtful and self-aware Morgan.