On Luck

For six weeks, I’m participating in a project called Great-full Summer 2012.  Given a prompt, I record my gratitude in this series of posts.  Perhaps you’ll join in?

My nephew has been visiting from NY this week and we’ve been hitting the hot spots of Southern California.  It’s been an exercise in kindness to be sure, as I navigate with an extra child in tow, especially one that I honestly don’t know that well.  We moved away a few days after he was born and don’t visit very often.  I consider him very brave and adventurous to fly across the country alone to spend ten days with people he barely knows.  But I guess that’s the shortcut that family creates.

I gave him a free ticket to the zoo but the attendant waved it away.  Save it for another time.  Later he bought a bag of cotton candy for his cousin and the attendant knocked 50 cents off the price of one and told him to take two.

Wow, this is your lucky day! someone said.  Luck.

Kindness.  It was the small actions of two kind people who made his day brighter.  We tend to attribute good things that come our way to luck but that’s a shortcut, too.  I believe that everything everywhere originates with someone’s decision to be kind.  The action that follows creates the magic that makes the world go ’round.

Each day I am grateful for the silent miracles of kindness in action.  Recognizing it inspires my own not-so-random intentional acts of love.