In my fantasy life I am able to stay at home and plant flowers, make dolls and bake all day and yet some how have enough money to pay all my bills and have lots of money leftover to buy fabric and cookbooks.
But in my real life I have a job and too many bills and a lot of stress and sometimes have to deal with not-so-nice people.
In life we just have to deal with not-so-nice people don't we? The maniac driver that cuts you off in traffic so you yell at him in front of your kids. Or the rude sales clerk or the impatient waitress. I even had the experience in a fabric store awhile back when I was picking up a copy of Stuffed Magazine. I was quite excited because my dolls were published in Stuffed magazine! The lady cutting my fabric asked what I was making so I told her I was making a doll and I'm sure in some giddy fashion I showed her the photo of Mismatched Marty in the magazine.
Well she looked at the photo with a look of maybe not disgust but disapproval. She looked at me, did not smile and did not comment and then blankly went back to cutting my fabric.
Now I have to say I was taken aback. I don't need a sales clerk to validate my creative abilities or pat me on the back for making a doll as rockin' as Mismatched Marty but what I did need from this particular sales clerk was for her to be nice.
So that day I was bothered. Things like this bother me. I stew. I try not to but I do. So this bothered me and it affected my mood for the rest of the day. Was I short with the next clerk who helped me pay for my fabric? Was I a not-so-courteous driver on the way home? Did I have patience with Beanie when we did homework that night? I can't remember but I imagine I let that one experience affect my experiences with others for the rest of the day.
I do believe our interactions with others are interconnected but we usually don't think too much about how our behavior and our mood affects other people and can set off a chain of events.
So I continue to read Do One Nice Thing and I continue to be more inspired by acts of utter kindness, random or otherwise. I've started a personal crusade, a kill 'em with kindness crusade. And in my efforts to be more nice and therefore change the temperament of the universe, I plan to post links here every once in awhile to cool places where you can make a difference.
Such as the Big Apple Circus.
Did you know you can send a bottle of bubbles for their clown doctors to use when they visit hospitalized children? The Big Apple doctors make thousands of bedside visits each year to intensive care units, bone marrow transplant centers, burn-treatment centers, emergency rooms and acute care clinics. And if that's not enough they visit the elderly in nursing facilities, have special performances for kids with hearing and vision impairments, and have after school programs for at-risk kids. So cool!
And if you don't feel like mailing a bottle of bubbles you can make a donation that will go directly to any of the programs you choose.
Check out their website because they do a lot of cool stuff and they're pretty nice to people too.
