Month: December 2021

Gratitude is an important part of being; expressions of appreciation, even small, can serve as balm over the myriad of minor abrasions scraping the skin of a single sleep-wake cycle. But there is another soothing salve to routine experience that should not be overlooked, a unique liniment of soulful analgesia that I have too often undervalued in my life and the purposeful way that I live it: the compliment.

It’s curious that a single letter substitution in the word – an “e” for the “i” – changes its meaning yet maintains something vital in terms of its nature. To complement is to enhance or improve, to bring towards perfection. To compliment is to praise or admire, to commend another person for an action, communication, or something simply inherent to who they are.

How you responded just then was very helpful. You have really developed a nice way of responding to adversity. I’m impressed by how much you’ve grown. These expressions are important examples of feedback in response to something said or done. Your smile lights up a room. You have a beautiful voice. That color suits you. These are observations related to the perhaps inherited essence of another human voyager. Both types of supportive expressions are typically warmly received.

How often do you compliment others?

Some time ago, I was leaving a coffee shop, fresh cup of tea in hand, when a guy sitting on a stone wall with a dog called out to me. There was a clear itinerant air to the man’s situation: ruffled hair, unshaven cheeks, clothes that may have missed some wash cycles. “What’s your name?” he asked. I could have said nothing. I could have made something up. I could have pretended that I had not hear him. For some reason, however, I stopped, turned, and told him my given name.

“Very strong!” he replied, stroking his dog’s ears. “Your mother chose that one very purposefully.”

The comment took me off guard. Although my mom had passed years before, I had just been thinking about her, in fact, and had been wondering what she might, in turn, be thinking about me (assuming that she had inclination to do so in the next life). “Yes, she did,” I said, as if somehow I knew from conversations we had while she was alive. There was a pause, and I half expected the fellow to ask me for some money.

“There’s history in that name,” he concluded. “Respect that.” He turned away. As did I.

Now here I am, five or more years later, remembering that brief encounter, a sliver of a snippet of my total years spent thus far on this planet. Unexpectedly, that moment made me feel good. It still does.

The other day a colleague texted me some dimensions. “A 24 inch diameter base would fit fine,” the text said. I had no idea what this referred to. “Did you mean to send this to me,” I texted back. “Oops!” he answered, “Believe it or not, an artist doing a piece for us has the same name!” Well, the nerve of someone else to have the same name, I laughed. On a whim, I googled my name on LinkedIn and learned that actually over 600 people have profiles with the same name as mine. Yep, over 600 people with the same first and last name have profiles on a single English language app. How many more have the same name, I wondered, but don’t have profiles? Out of curiosity, I checked the website out for the artist in my state who has the same name. “He’s pretty talented,” I texted my colleague. “Both people with that name have significant talent,” the colleague replied.

Now that was surprisingly unnecessary. I wasn’t fishing for flattery; my artist namesake has some serious ability and I was acknowledging it. Nonetheless, it was kind of my colleague to send that note. It meant something to me. It made me smile.

Which reminds me of the power, and the role, of compliments in the humdrum hustle and daily bustle of our 21st century world. We are busy. We are frequently adrift in our respective internal thoughts and self-absorptions. But a simple authentic expression of tribute can stop most of us in our tracks. You didn’t need to say that, we might think or respond. That’s right, the person’s eyes or face respond. I didn’t need to. And yet they did.

Spontaneous accolades, however seemingly trivial, have great amplifying potential. In fact, the best ones are tiny, are shared spontaneously, are not offered without fanfare, prelude, or expectation. They are honest expressions of , unwrapped benefactions, bequests delivered humbly, freely, to people we love, people we call colleagues, people we don’t even know. I see you, a compliment says. I recognize your worth. You. Someone who isn’t me. Someone who is named. Someone who is named by others. Someone who shares a name with others. Someone who, despite the conventions of what and how we call one another, gives birth, often accidentally, to the magnificent and the magical, to the unique capacity of all life to shine, regardless of its so-called title. You. I celebrate you. I honor you, especially when you step, either mindlessly or mindfully, outside the ego boundaries of what it means to be separate, to be an individual, to be named, especially when you do so without interest in any acknowledgement associated with that generous journey.

As we turn the page on another year in the western calendar, as the earth spins closest to the sun in its annual orbit in one spiral arm of a galaxy we call the Milky Way, as many of us hurriedly purchase presents to exchange with people in our closest friendship and family circles, let us recall the gentle, unassuming gift of the unscheduled, unrehearsed compliment. It may represent a continuous complement to the physical exchanges of caring we make on the basis of an annual holiday.

Compliments hold the cosmos in their hearts.

Suppose I were to ask you to take a trip with me.

“To where?” you might ask.

“Around the world,” I reply.

Your questions follow. “Which direction? How long will it take? Will we get to see all the continents? How are we traveling?”

My answers: “Whichever direction you’d like. As long as you’d like. Sure, if you’d like. By foot.”

Our theoretical conversation is not likely to inspire confidence. Aside from the obvious problems associated with geography (there are large bodies of water to traverse), weather (it gets really hot and cold in some places), and logistics (they don’t make backpacks big enough for such travel), I have presented no itinerary or budget. And I have proposed that we, uh, er, um, that we … well … that we walk.

What?

You are quickly recalculating my sanity, your eyes searching my words for a glimmer of reason, so I offer you an even more astounding observation: “I’ve already done it twice, you know. It’s not as difficult as you may think.”

I have, actually. And it’s not, honestly. In fact, you may have already completed one or more trips yourself.

Here’s how. The circumference of the earth is just under 25,000 miles. Given that an average person takes almost 7000 steps a day, it is possible for anyone who lives a typical human lifespan to walk the equivalent of two or three global circumnavigations.

The calculation left me, at first, nonplussed. Wow. That’s a lot of steps. Then I thought about all the small journeys in a single day, the shuffling from one room to another, the purposeless meandering and the purposeful plodding, the traverses of hardwood, pavements, sidewalks, and fields, and I realized how strange that all that movement, most circular and without directionality, adds up, that if you stack it all together it amounts to the equivalent of one or more earths in a human lifetime.

It is important to note that we are discussing averages. Some people have longer legs. Some do not have functioning legs; my father wheeled rather than walked his way through most of his life. But he, and others, still accomplished their fair share of journeying.

Just think how far we might get, individually and together, if we adopted the mindset of alignment, of direction, of purpose?

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is credited with the expression “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. Little matter that Lao Tzu put in writing what perhaps generations before him shared through oral tradition. The point is that we have long realized, as a conscious race of bipeds, that incremental change makes a difference. And we have celebrated the prudence and potential associated with the cultivation of that awareness and the providential power inherent and immanent in its enactment in human personal and social activities. Where we struggle, however, is trusting the process. We want, and seem to need, assurances. We are too easily distracted by the steps themselves to maintain focus on the cumulative impact of those steps. Little can blossom to great, if nurtured, if valued, if believed. Seeds become great trees, ideas become social movements, commitments become stirring stories of the commonplace transformed to the extraordinary – if only we nurture them, if only we share them, if only we live them on a daily, hourly, and even minute-by-minute basis.

Uncertainty can really stink. Am I worth anything and do I make a difference? Are you worth something more and do you make a greater or lesser difference? Our globe has been spinning through space for billions of years. Since life was born, it has been under continual threat. I am convinced that the essence of people who have died has not been extinguished. But daily I am confronted with tales of woe, reason for despair, evidence of the intermittent unworthiness of human existence. I peer into the eyes of my loving four-legged dog and cat and I begrudge them their ability to accept, to be, to not (perhaps) think about tomorrow, or yesterday, or broad sweeps of history stretched behind this present moment or poised unrealized before it. They live. They yearn. They stretch. They rest in the warmth of the afternoon sun and the respite of timelessness nestled within tranquil naps and narrow-eyed stares into the world just outside the glass windows of our home. They are not burdened by the capacity to calculate the number of steps taken in a lifetime. Their focus, from what I can tell, is now – especially if that now is close to another meal, or a nap, or an ear scratch, or a walk.

Ah, again, the walk. The steps. The physical ability, either through motor movements of our bodies or power-assisted resources of our technology, to propel ourselves forward. The mental ability to do so through intentions, purpose. The spiritual ability to bring tiny influence and impact through better thoughts, less selfish decisions, and small acts of otherness.

Which is what kindness is: otherness. It is me getting past myself, just enough, to see you, to listen to you, to realize that the divine, if and as it exists in this world, has as much spark and flame within you as it may have in me, probably more, when I consider how lazy I can sometimes feel, how tired, how indifferent. It is the indifference that is the poison. Sure, I may feel fatigued yet how ungrateful it is for me to use weariness as an excuse for indifference, for turning away from others’ pain, for forgetting that the journey of each human circumnavigation of the world begins with the first roll of a newborn, the first crawl of a baby, the first step of a toddler. We are driven to move forward; it is in our genetic code. We are capable of helping others do the same; it is in our life code.

There is so much noise in the world today, yes, so much acrimony, hate (real and feigned), and judgment. Yet there is also so much potential. We are a species capable of walking around our earthly world! Together, five of us accrue enough steps in our lifetimes to walk to the moon. As a species, we have even traversed the galaxy and beyond with our accumulated footfall. Imagine what more is possible if we only turn our collective thoughts towards common goals and purpose. Our thoughts – each of us has an estimated 25,000 of them a day, eerily similar to the number of miles in the earth’s circumference. If each thought was a step, every human has enough to awake in the morning, turn east, and journey through the joys and needs of the entire planet by the time we close our eyes at night for sleep. Suppose only one thousand of those daily thoughts were turned towards others. Suppose we learned how to share, with one another, a mere one hundred of those otherness-oriented notions. What might we accomplish if we focused on alignment rather than competition, on the whole instead of its parts?

We can travel far, oh so far, if we only remember that we have a choice on where we go and how we travel. Will you take the journey with me? I’m all packed. So, I hope, are you.