Help one another. Help someone you know. Help someone you don't know. Help someone in a small way. Help someone in a big way. Help a person, help a place, help a thing.
And then celebrate it and share it.
We need some good news. We need to set the tone for 2017. And we have power to control it. We have the power to be better than decent and spread it around. As we do so, we demonstrate to others how we want to be treated.
Perhaps my request is simplistic and hokey. Or perhaps believing it to be so is indicative of the current state of things — that somehow we've come to see being kind as a silly waste of time. There's a culture of "I'm going to get what's mine" that has pervaded our lives. It comes from competition. It comes from struggling to achieve in an environment that champions acquirement more than generosity. We do not need all the things. We are not lesser people because we do not have all the things. And having all the things does not make us better people.
But help — helping and receiving help — has enriched my life in so many ways. It's all that they say about paying it forward and more.
No, we won't turn the world into one great big snuggly ball of love and goodwill overnight. We can start small and make kindness and helping others something that we do day after day after day until it is a habit that comes naturally. I believe that we can do it.
I have to believe that we can do it because I'm so tired of all the bad news. It grows, feeds upon itself, becomes normalized from our Facebook feeds and 24-hour news shows into our daily actions. We don't have have opposable thumbs and free will so that we can be horrible to one another. We are capable of great things. And, like it or not, we are all leaders because someone is always watching and learning from our actions. What kind of lessons do you want to be remembered for teaching?
Now... pass it on.
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