Kindness is a Full Circle Thing
This story started out a long time ago and has come full circle so to speak. Sometimes we don't know where the circle goes, and that is okay.
The other day my husband, overcome with emotion and gratitude, showed me an email he had received from someone who was thanking him for something he said to them five years ago. He had no idea their conversation back then went anywhere or had any impact whatsoever.
It just emphasizes how we have no idea what other people’s stories are and what they are dealing with on a daily basis or how many times they may have leaned on a kind gesture or words that seemed to have little significance at the time, only to come back years later and say thanks, or maybe even never.
More recently we were talking, reminiscing even, as seniors tend to do now and then. My husband was explaining that when he was still a teenager in school how grateful he was for the kindness of an older neighbor (we’ll call him John). John used to give him a ride to school in an old pickup truck and my husband would help them out around the yard or with any chores they needed help with after school. In looking back, John’s kindness was a pivotal event that changed the course of my husband's life and maybe even saved it.
Back in the sixties, in a low-income military family which included other siblings, self expression was not endorsed or encouraged, meaning there was no discussion or challenging the word or decisions of the patriarch of the household. Period. It was during a physical crisis, a thyroid storm which had my husband hospitalized and near death, that his mother was told he was not expected to live. Officially a child as he was still under 18, and with no room in the children’s ward with all the little kids, he was placed in the psych ward. Being in the psych ward meant they were putting him through all the usual psych ward tests and treatments and being the sixties, he could hear people down the hall screaming from being zapped and ‘tested’. He knew this was not the place for him, but pleas to his parents to get him out were denied as the mystery of his thyroid storm and massive weight loss had not yet been resolved. His friend John heard about his plea for help though and long story short, decided to sign him out of the hospital. He was given enough medication for six weeks and told never to go more than a hundred miles from the area in case he ran out of medication. The rest is another story but that was fifty years ago and he has not lived within a hundred miles of there since then.
While musing over this critical phase of his life, my husband was speculating on whether John was still around and how great it would be to be able to tell him in person what a difference he had made. After making a couple of inquiries via face-book and checking the white pages, he realized John was not only around, but still lived in the same house with the same phone number. He called him up and not only is John around, he is as sharp as ever and remembered who my husband was and all the details of the times. So, they had a great chat and he got to thank John in person and tell him how much his life changed for the better because of that one act of kindness.
The joy my husband felt by being able to reach back and say thank you to someone who helped him way back when was incredible and authentic and I realized that’s where and what the hallelujah is, it is that heart to heart connection.
Being authentic is not done through the intellect, it is done through the heart. When hearts connect at the heart level, little heart lights light up all across the planet, like connecting the dots. It is in that moment of authentic joy, authentic selfless love, that the joy which needs no explanation raises the vibration and therefore the consciousness of that network of hearts. In so doing, our planetary ‘room’ gets a little brighter and a few more people notice what feels right in their hearts and are able to step into the light. When they give themselves permission to be more authentic, more dots get connected and more people feel joy in that place called hallelujah, which is everywhere in the consciousness of All That Is.
