152-18-12-2010

Celebrating Over 150 Articles on Human Kindness!

Be Contagious: Be … Glitter

By W. Owen Thornton

What does it mean to practice human kindness all the time?  I’ll hold back the part where I address whether we can practice human kindness all the time and talk about what it means to do so in theory, at any rate.  I think practicing human kindness all the time means that we place being “human glitter” at the top of our priority list.  The next thing we require, then, is a definition of what it means to be human glitter.

We know what real glitter is when we work with it.  Glitter often comes in clear plastic bags or tubes and it is used in art projects.  We lay down some glue in a strategic place and we dust the glue with glitter and voila!  We have a nice sparkly addition to our art project.  Interestingly enough, I think there are now two components to what it means to be glitter in real life, even from this ‘artful description’ of how it is used.

First we do need to have some glue about us, if we’re going to practice human kindness all the time.  We have to have some stick-tuit-tiveness!  We have to be determined to make the world better around us, by giving the glitter of the world a place to rest.  And we have to know where to apply that glue, don’t we?  Cover the art project entirely with glue and the glitters loses its luster.  So we have to be strategic about human kindness … we have to apply it where it can be seen, accepted and appreciated.  I do think we can throw ourselves out there and that it won’t be appreciated.  We need to learn where and with whom we can practice human kindness.  However, if asked to determine how to judge this, it is always best to err on being generous with human kindness rather than being stingy.  It is better to have practiced human kindness and lost, than to not practice human kindness at all.  Let me name the human quality I give to the glue in relation to a glue/glitter art or life projects.  I call the glue “intelligent dogged determination.”  We need to be intelligent about where to use it and have dogged determination in order to hold onto the glitter once it is used.  Now we have to still talk about the glitter itself.

Glitter never goes precisely where you want it.  I mean it does stick to glue, but glitter also falls off our art and life projects and … it goes everywhere.  There seems to be something quite fascinating about the analogy I’m making here.  We need to know where and when to apply glue … we need to be determined to continue to practice human kindness in specific situations, but we also see that once we add the glitter that human kindness is the result from our glitter-drop.  And we know that glitter goes everywhere.

Glitter on the glue is fun and eye-catching.  Glitter inspires you to want to use glitter on your own.  And … glitter refuses to stay where it lands.  It’s a wanderer … a traveler … a “go wherever I can” sort of substance.  Glitter rubs off on people.  This is why we need to practice human kindness regularly.  We have to keep putting the glitter out there in order to inspire others to do so as well.  And glitter makes you laugh.  You can merely walk through a room where glitter has been used and find that it is contagious.  It’ll be on your clothes, your skin … and your hair.

And I don’t know about you, but I think glitter is about love, too.  For if you have ever seen glitter on the skin of someone you’re attracted to … or if you’ve ever seen glitter in the hair of someone you care about … doesn’t glitter make them look like an angel?  Doesn’t glitter upon someone say that they are fun and fun-loving?   Doesn’t it say that they are someone who is willing to go out into the world and have fun … even if they didn’t deliberately put the glitter there in the first place?  Glitter makes people sparkle.

And that’s what I’m talking about.  When it comes to human kindness we should sparkle.  We should be doing the kinds of things that need to be done such that those activities create human glitter.  When it comes to human glitter, we can catch this form of glitter only when we’re paying attention.  Oh sure, sometimes, when someone is doing something particularly nice for us, we can catch them at it and we see their glitter.  But often, when a friend or loved one, or a stranger who might be coming to be a newly loved friend, is talking with us in a quiet moment … it is then that we see their glitter.  We see the joy that they spread to the world simply by them being … them.

We are all glitter.  Every human being on the planet is glitter.  Some glitter becomes burnished and tarnished and blackened (and this is extremely sad), but I believe that we all started out as our own unique glitter colour and that we were meant to share as much of ourselves with as many others as we can … in order to make this world a more beautiful place.

I think back to what I believe now, is the principle lesson in the movie Bruce Almighty.  Morgan Freeman, as God, is talking to Bruce.  God is saying that the problem with human kind is that we are always asking God for help.  But God is trying to say that he gave us the power to do what we need for ourselves … or, if we cannot do that … to find the person or persons who can help us achieve our goals.  We need God for the bigger things in life, but when it comes to achieving what we desire here on earth, we have all the power we require.  Maybe, if you believe in God at all, what we need Him for is to 1. help us find and do that which will really make us happy (for we can be self deceptive), 2. Ask him to place the people in our lives who can help us to achieve that which we desire to achieve, 3. And to have the courage to first ask people for help and 4. Give us the strength to be able to do the things before us that we know we have to do in order to get our dreams – in order that we do not get stuck in a rut!

With this look on life – and Bruce creates the slogan “Be the Miracle” – then miracles can occur every single day because we mere, slow-witted human beings can be miracles for ourselves and for one another.  Lately, I’ve been thinking of the talk I’m going to deliver for the Laurier Student Public Interest Research Group at Laurier on January 26, 2011.  I’ve been thinking about what I want to say about human kindness.  These random thoughts are going through my mind and suddenly, while I’m thinking about delivering a talk about human kindness I see a woman in front of me drop papers.  You know, we use the example of whether or not we hold open doors for others or whether or not we help people who have dropped papers as examples of human kindness and this is only the second time I can remember ever being tested with the “dropped paper” life example.  That last time was a couple of years ago at Western.  I failed and then passed this test.  First I walked by them, and then I turned around and started to help.  This time, while thinking about what I was going to say about human kindness in a talk, I stopped immediately and picked up those papers.  I saw the dropped papers as a test about my human kindness capabilities even as I was helping out.  It felt good to be “instinctive” when it came to a situation like that.  I’ve been lost, or found myself walking home because of a bike or car malfunction where I’ve been praying that someone would help.  And no one did.  Human kindness can be huge!

I think we’re all a little like that some of the time.  We’re all just hoping that someone will stop and chat … stop and really listen.  We’re all hoping that someone practicing the “glitter” lifestyle will stop and be kind.  As you know, I call these small acts of human kindness spontaneous.  These acts ARE important.  In all the evidence I have gathered about human kindness, it seems as though we have the attention span of a gnat.  What I mean is we can set out to be someone who practices spontaneous human kindness, but we so quickly become focused on our own lives that we fail to follow through. 

Remember two stories here.  First people are working with words in jumbled up sentences.  Their task is to put the sentences back together.  The exercise of working with words like this sort of drives the words home into their subconscious I guess.  In this test one group of people worked with words that reminded them of being old, like “old, grey, Florida and slow.”  The other group of people working with mixed up sentences did not work with words like this.  After the two groups worked with these words, the test really began.  They were timed how long it took them to walk to the elevator.  The group who had worked with the words that revolved around age walked slower.  When confronted with the questions of whether or not they knew they had been working with words around age, they all answered no.  The lesson here is that whatever comes in to us influences us, whether we want it too or not.  Live in a negative world and we’re going to be negatively influenced.  It’s hard to be glitter when most of our news is negative.  So, to be glitter, censor what comes into your mind ruthlessly.  There is some good news here however.

My brother-in-law who has also gone to university later in his life, is taking a psychology class.  The good news is that these kinds of trends where we are influenced by information as in the above example only seem to last approximately 20 minutes.  I have two insights here.  First, the bad news is, if we are continually bombarded by negative news, issues or ideas, then our 20 minutes before things wear off, will never wear off … so this will make it harder to be glitter in the wake of all the negativity.  Second, the good news is, we do only get distracted for 20 minutes and if we can censor ourselves from the bad stuff that bombards us, we can at least go back to a neutral status where we have a chance of being in awareness that we originally started out the day attempting to be glitter or to practice human kindness.

The second story I will share with you is the phone booth story.  Here half the folk who had used a phone booth found a dime in the coin return and the other half did not.  In all cases, once the dime was either found or not found a co-conspirator of the test would drop papers once the person turned away from the phone booth.  Those who did not find the dime?  None of them helped pick up papers.  Those who did find the dime?  Most of them did (but not all).  There are two things to take away from this.  Have a neutral experience happen to you, like not finding a dime and this does nothing to your human kindness outlook.  Have a single positive thing happen to you like finding a dime in a phone booth coin return slot and voila … the entire world seems like it is more willing to play.  The good news we learn from this story is that spontaneous acts of human kindness do make us want to be more like glitter.  We are as readily caught up by simple good fortune as we are susceptible to negative influences.  So, helping one person through a door by holding it for them makes them more likely to hold a door for someone else which makes it more likely someone else will help someone pick up papers when they are dropped.  So practicing human kindness is always easier than we think and simple acts are more meaningful that we suspect.

But last, and you know I was getting here, I do want to talk about deliberate, thoughtful proactive kinds of human kindness.  These are the above and beyond acts … the miracles that we can provide for one another.  I want to give you a theoretical big example and a very real-life small one … that’s bigger than you think.  The big example is hearing someone say: “I would love it if I could find an editor for my book.”  Or, “I would love it if someone knew so-and-so where I want to work to see if I could increase my chances of getting a job there.”  So, you have to be in a place to play … maybe you have to be in a mental framework where someone has held open a door for you in the past 20 minutes and this minor spontaneous kind act compels you to:  Call the person at the company where this person wants to work, ask if they will meet your friend regarding a job and then calling that friend and telling them that they should call Jan at XYZ company because they are willing to chat.  That’s the big kind of miracle we can perform for one another.  (And remember all acts of human kindness go out into the universe and give us all the chance to experience even more acts of human kindness – perhaps not directly or a one-to-one correlation, but your world is made better from acts like these.)

And there is a subtle and kind act that doesn’t seem like enough but is sometimes huge.  I have done this for a person recently and I have experienced this gift from someone else.  We can listen.  We can listen to someone and hear their story and empathize and sympathize.  We underplay this gift because it doesn’t feel like enough.  I listened to my friend at UWO recently and she told me what a great help it is just to have a neutral third party, someone not directly involved in her every-day world, to just listen to her and to show that you care.  I guess I show that I care by continuing to ask her if there is anything I can do to help her.  She is so busy, so pushed by her work load (and I think we’re all pushed by that) that I see the weight of the work on her shoulders and I just want to help.  There’s nothing I can do … really.  But it’s in the listening and in the genuine offer to help that comforts her and gives her strength.  I wish I could do more … I wish I could “magic wand away” some of the work.  I cannot.  But I can listen.

I have a friend who does this for me.  And the feeling we get from being listened to is validating, life affirming.  We become “persons” in our own life stories when we are listened to by a caring other.  It is funny when I heard my friend tell me she is grateful for being listened to.  I felt like I wasn’t being a good friend.  I felt this way because I couldn’t find a way to help her.  But in thinking about the friend that I have who listens to me … I wouldn’t want him to help.  I wouldn’t know where to let him into my life where he could help.  But I don’t have to do these things because in listening to me, he has done enough.  I feel grateful for the opportunity to be able to do this for my friend.  I never thought I would be enough … enough of a person for anyone to be seen as someone … someone who is enough to help someone else simply by listening.  So … listen to someone.  It’s huge for them.  And it’s huge for you.

So whether you are a single flake of glitter, say this is a single sparkle on someone’s cheek, or whether you dump your hole tube of glitter upon someone’s life and you change it phenomenally by doing the big miraculous deed for them … I say, human kindness is like being glitter.  I attempted to do this, this year at Laurier.  I attempted to be glitter as a teaching assistant for my students and I attempted to be glitter in my classes with my professors and fellow MA candidates.  Thinking about being glitter is easy.  Thinking about being glitter is a small task.  It is one that you can keep in the back of your mind that doesn’t take up a lot of space.  So I think you CAN practice human kindness 24 hours a day – well it’s harder when you’re asleep, naturally … but I think if we think of being glitter, we can be more “on” … more plugged into what it means to be kind to our “selves” and one another.  We can “Be the Miracle” for ourselves and others.

To close then, I will say this.  God Bless and thank you all for reading this.  May your holidays be filled with joy, loved ones, and human kindness. 

And should you be experiencing sadness at this time of year … because this time of year can bring sadness to the foreground … I encourage you to take a specific time and feel the sadness.  Revel in it.  Roll in it.  Stink up the joint with sadness for a limited time … say 20 minutes.  And in doing so, I think you will free up some space for wholeness and goodness.  Sadness leaves us fractured like shards of glass with different parts of ourselves feeling alone, isolated and hurt.  We are meant to feel fractured but we are not meant to stay in this place.  I don’t think we need to be afraid of our “selves” or our emotions anymore.  I think if we accept our “selves” rather than pretending to be okay all the time (when we clearly are not okay) … if we accept our vulnerability … then we can process our feelings.  Remember … we carry stuff for 20 minutes.  Why not focus on the negative feelings now and allow ourselves to be okay 20 minutes later.  Human beings are miraculous machines.  We can literally change our attitudes on a dime.  It seems silly to think that. But the proof of experiments shows us this is true: and there’s a lot of cause for hope in that notion, isn’t there.

God Bless

Owen