It’s easy to feel overwhelmed before we get a chance to be “whelmed” on this big blue orb of ours. Change is happening a mile a minute. National and global politics have risen to the top of North American dialogue. Social media of late is a blaze of observations about the bad and the ugly, tilting precariously away from the good.

It’s natural in our stress to take a step back from people – to insulate ourselves as a matter of self-preservation of spirit and mental well-being. It’s easy to tune out in the belief that there’s no ability to control or influence things that flit around us like atoms in the universe.
It’s time—in our communities and our homes, where are families live, where our spirit is most connected to things that matter most and deeper meaning of life itself – to lean in to the challenge. To be the light in a world that can often seem dark.

I think to refresh who we are and why we matter as people and as a community, we need to think smaller not bigger. Amidst the forest, it’s in the saplings that we find satisfaction and reason for being.

How great it feels to encounter a smile and a thank you when one waits to hold a door open for someone wrestling with a shopping bag or a sugar-rushed child, or an elderly person who has the time of day for a hello and a helping hand.

I imagine a world where society more deeply celebrates the magic of the moments of connection our generosity creates. Where we repeat the actions and they become exponential in paying it forward in kindness. How amazing the soul can feel to have gratitude for the life we live, and to give in the belief that life isn’t just about us – it’s about SOMEONE. ELSE.

We’ve seen it – in the Tim Hortons drive through where drivers pay for the driver behind. There’s an annual Random Act of Kindness Day (Friday November 3 in Canada in 2017). Communities plant trees, paint slides in the playground, or have an open space garbage clean-up day. It’s great, but now is the time to magnify and accelerate what happens when we choose to care right from the roots of our soul.

When my grandma was in her final days in a hospital, a nurse had placed her last name on a name tag in the slot outside the door, with a red-coloured heart beside it. I kept the tag and remember a heartfelt gesture so simple with such depth of meaning to me. My grandpa used to flick the outside light on and off when we left Sunday dinner when I was a kid. I would always see him peering through the diamond-shaped window in the door. I asked him once why he did that. His response: for him it was a thank you for coming for dinner and a wish for a safe journey home. His heart…built into the rat-ta-tat-tat pattern of the light blinking into the night…a WWII spirit so appreciative of life.

I think in the big things we wrestle with, paradoxically it’s the small things that have a firm hold on our memory. We replay these moments of magic in our minds. We wedge them into memory because they reveal to us what we all crave in our soul: a connection to a bigger spirit of togetherness, knowing that we mattered to others. Our small gestures of kindness fill our heart, set us free, and re-charge our spirit. In the small we find simpler truth, beauty, and goodness. Grace, humility, and generosity doesn’t make us “snowflakes” (to borrow from social media crankiness these days), it makes us the Tinman who successfully found and fully tapped the heart.

This book celebrates the small things of beauty all around us. If we choose to see them, we open the door to transformed lives, and transformed communities.