“Life is short.  Be swift to love!  Make haste to be kind!”

– Henri Frederic Amiel

My friend, Qn Dani, wrote a wonderful blog last week about Kindness.  For me it was a wonderful illustration of the way that being kind to another person can lift the spirits of both people in the situation — how bringing healing to another person heals us as well.  Her story is a beautiful one, and I hope you’ll stop by and read it.

Life is short.  I certainly didn’t think about such things when I was a child.  Even when I became an adult, I always lived one day at a time; and the number of days seemed endless.  I never could understand the folks who were sent into a tailspin by reaching a milestone birthday.  Thirty?  Piece of cake — with candles, of course.  Forty?  Cresting the hill, but still climbing.  Fifty?  Standing on the peak of the mountain and able to see all the many options for ways to spend the second half of my life.  Sixty?  The only thing that got my attention was the simple mathematical fact that 2 x 60=120.  I don’t know anyone who has lived to be 120.  For the first time, I began to consider that life — the rest of mine — might be short.

It was time to take inventory.  As I looked back over the first sixty years of my life, I saw many things.  There were decisions I wish I had made differently.  There were moments, and even years, that brought me great joy.  There were feelings hurt and lessons learned and decisions to alter the way I approached the people I met.  There was a lot of growing done and a lot of wisdom gained — sometimes the hard way.  How would I spend what now was less than the second half of my life?

These thoughts were on my mind last week.  My oldest son celebrated his 40th birthday.  If no decade milestones grab your attention, I guarantee that a forty-year-old child will make you sit up and take notice!  I pulled out my calculator and tried to figure out how this could have happened.  Was he born when I was ten?  Certainly that couldn’t be the case.  I realized that one of the resolutions I made on my sixtieth birthday was working out pretty well — I would not let the fact that my body was aging decree that my thoughts had to be old as well.  There are still new adventures awaiting me, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life reliving the ones that I already have enjoyed.  I love the fact that people in their forties — and younger — still are good company for this old woman.

It is another resolution that is the important one today.  As I thought about all the older people I had met along the way, I realized that the ones I had learned from the most — the ones whose company had been enjoyable — were those who brought kindness, joy, and grace to all they met.  That’s what I want to be when I grow up!  I want to be the older person who can be open to share, ready with a smile, and more interested in others than in my own aches, pains, and complaints.  How would I develop these traits?  Well, I think we stop complaining when we focus on all we have  rather than all we don’t have or all we have lost.  Gratitude is the basis for graceful living, and I do my best to practice it daily.  Listening to others is a wonderful thing.  As I hear the stories and struggles and excitement of younger people, I am taken back to the memories I’ve stored in my own life.  Sometimes, if I listen long enough, I discover common ground that I share with the person I’ve met.  If it makes them feel good to be heard and understood, it makes me feel great to still feel connected to the younger generation.

The last thing I resolved to do was to meet life with a smile.  There is nothing worse than a cranky old lady — just ask my husband — so I decided to consciously work at finding the love I want to share with others and let it well up inside and pour from my eyes and light my face with a smile.  It is a small thing, but a woman in the supermarket yesterday reminded me of how powerful a smile can be.  I was turning the corner from the produce department when we met head-on, and this stranger greeted me with the most wonderful, open, sparkling smile I have seen in weeks!  ’Wow,’ I thought, ’she’s doing it, too!’  And I found my own smile grow even wider and my own joy bubble over in response to the love she was shining on the strangers all around her.

We may not all have the chance to share kindness in the remarkable way told by Dani, but certainly, we all can bring some love to the world.  All it takes is a smile.  Be kind to others and smile when you meet them.  I guarantee that they will be uplifted by your love.  I know, because I felt it yesterday, in the smile of a stranger.