The Power of Reaching Out

It doesn't take much to make someone's day.  It doesn't take much to break it, either.  

It's very easy to believe that we're islands, floating along, too wrapped up in our own thoughts, needs and desires to consider those we pass along the way.  But it's simply not true.  Humanity is intertwined.  People are linked, without ever realising it.  Why?  Because of the power we have to affect one another.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about the way a stranger's actions can impact on the kind of day we're having.  And I won't lie; it started out focused entirely on the negative...  

I recently wrote about the sudden, unexpected racist attacks I experienced on Twitter, after saying I was saddened by Britain's decision to leave the EU.  The hurtful names I was called, the unfair and incorrect judgements made against me by complete strangers and the bullying mob mentality of those sending the nasty messages all had their own effect on me.  I went from feeling as though I was merely expressing my views on social media, like any number of people do every minute of every day, to worrying that I had done something wrong and that perhaps I brought the nastiness on myself.

As the day wore on and the insults continued to pour into my notifications, I also found myself feeling cornered, scared and somehow other.  

And don't even get me started on how STUPID racism is in the first place...

Did the people sending the insults stop to think about how I might feel to receive them?  Almost certainly not.  But that didn't alter the effect.

Contrast that with another encounter on Twitter in the past week...

I'd been a bit low, for various reasons, but I'd been using social media relatively normally.  So, I was surprised to receive a message from someone , simply asking if I was alright, because I didn't seem my usual self.

Someone had taken the time out of their day to contact me, based on nothing but the tone of my tweets, which had led them to wonder if I was okay.  They didn't have to ask.  They could have carried on scrolling.  But they made the choice to check in and see if I was alright.  And that tiny action on their part completely changed the course of my day.  I felt valid.  I felt cared about.  I felt better, just for knowing that someone gave a damn.

That tiny event changed my whole way of thinking.  It made me realise that whilst we can break a person's day, or sour their mood with our thoughtlessness, we can also bring a bit of sunshine to a total stranger, just by trying to be nice.

When we reach out to someone we don't know, we're not doing it because we're duty bound by friendship or relation.  We're not doing it because we expect anything back from them (or at least, we shouldn't be).  When we reach out to someone we don't know - when we offer a stranger a little kindness, or we help out someone in need - we're doing it just because it's a nice, kind thing to do. 

How many times have you overheard someone struggling to find change for the car park?  How often do you notice someone on social media, saying they feel low and need a friend?  Be honest: how often do you walk by, or carry on scrolling? 

Yesterday, I was in London, visiting my sister.  We popped to ASDA and my sister went  to the in-store opticians,to buy a glasses repair kit.  As she reached the counter, she handed over her debit card, only to be told that the machine wasn't working.  I wasn't with her at the time and my sister hadn't brought any change with her.  She said she'd wait for me to join her, apologising to the staff member who'd rung her single item through the till.  But as I arrived, a man, upon hearing that the kit was only £2, took out his wallet and handed a coin to my sister.

It was, in reality, a tiny, trivial act (and as it turned out, my Mum appeared with £2, so the man didn't have to part company with his cash after all), but all three of us - my Mum, my sister and I - were still talking about the kindness of that man as we finished the rest of our shopping and left the supermarket.

It takes next to nothing to do something kind for another person.  But we never know how doing so will affect them.  

It takes very little effort to do something cruel towards another person.  And too often, we don't even think about how doing so will affect them.

We have a choice, every day, as to whether or not we reach out to our fellow humans.  And we have a choice as to what kind of interaction that will be.

Having experienced both, I have resolved to try to reach out a hand of friendship and never a hand of hostility.

It doesn't take much to reach out with kindness.  But you just might make a person's day.

We are not islands, floating around entirely isolated.  We are all linked, as we make our journeys through life.  And reaching out to another person, to offer just a little support along the way, can truly lighten the load.

Give it a try.

It's The Little Things...

So, here's the news:  I have a cold.  I'm possibly dying of some dreadful lurgy.  Or, perhaps it's (wo)man flu.  Either way, I feel pretty lousy right about now.  It's a bit like someone has taken my brain out of my head and replaced it with a really heavy, wet sponge.  And that sponge is so full of liquid, that some of it keeps dribbling out of my eyes and nose.  I hope I've painted you a lovely, mental image.  You're welcome.

I don't really have time to be ill.  I've got a novel that needs to be promoted (click here to buy it and I promise I won't sneeze on you), a YouTube video to finish editing, a new novel that I need to start work on and stories that need to be written and recorded in advance, for my weekly bedtime story feature on this blog.  Add a day job to all of that and you can probably see why getting ill is just not really something I can squeeze into my hectic schedule.  If I had a social life, I'd really be struggling...

Since I had to go to work today, I was forced to set my alarm for 6:45am and to be out of bed by seven.  Not easy, when you've spent most of the night wide awake, because you can't breathe and you're coughing so much that you're in danger of waking people in nearby towns.  Needless to say, when my alarm sounded this morning, all I wanted to do was crawl underneath the duvet and hide.

Phil's hiding under the duvet skills need work.

The trouble is, being poorly doesn't just affect your physical well being.  It can totally mess up your mood, too.  When your mouth's hanging open all the time (because you genuinely can't breathe through your nose), and you feel like an elephant has taken to tap-dancing on your skull, the last thing you're likely to be is particularly jolly.  And, if you're anything like me, feeling a little fed up is going to make you super duper sensitive to the words and actions of everyone around you.

No matter what you do, feeling ill is going to leave you vulnerable.  You're not at your best and your metaphorical shields are on the fritz.  Even if you plaster on a smile, engage in some major positive thinking and drug yourself up to the eyeballs with Lemsip and Sudafed and whatever else you can find in the medicine cabinet, you're still going to be more likely to notice those little things that you might usually be able to ignore.

I am currently 90% Lemsip.

Being sensitive to those little things really does make you aware of just how much the tiniest thing can affect your day. And if other people can have a major effect on us, then it stands to reason that we can have a pretty big effect on them, too.

For example, today I've been mostly coughing, sneezing and blowing my nose.  Reactions to this have ranged from: Outright laughter (to be fair, that was from the kids I work with), to tutting, all the way to actually being told to shut up.  Pro tip: if you're telling someone to shut up when they're coughing/sneezing/doing something else they can't actually help, you might want to consider most definitely not doing that.  Juuuust saying.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and beg for eternal sympathy.  It's a cold, not something that might actually result in my grisly death.  But the people who've eased the weight of my wet-sponge-brain today have unanimously been the ones who've realised that actually, I can't do much to stop myself from sneezing or coughing, and that it's far better to blow my nose into a tissue than it is to just stand there, casually allowing a stream of snot to flow down my face.

Again with the mental images...  

Anyway, the more I thought about those little things - the angry tut if I've sneezed more than three times in a row, or the frown in my general direction if my coughing gets irritating to people around me - the more I thought that it's surely pretty easy to step outside of ourselves for a second and think that even if something like endless coughing is annoying to listen to, it must be much worse to actually be endlessly coughing?

And then I started thinking about how it applies to life in general.  Regardless of the health of a person, it's almost certainly not cool to start having a go at them for something they can't help.  It's also pretty lousy to make a person feel bad just because you're in a grouch.  

The smallest things we do can affect the other people around us.  I remember once going to a school assembly, in which my Head of Year told us all that simply holding a door open for someone, rather than letting it slam behind you, is a small way to affect someone else's day in a positive, rather than negative way.  Which is why I always hold doors open.  And why I will sarcastically mutter "you're welcome" after people who don't thank me for it.  Because screw those people.

I guess what I'm trying to say is just think.  Think about how what you're saying and doing might affect the people around you.

Also, think about congratulating me on being poorly, yet having written a blog AND edited a YouTube video, this evening.  Oh and think about watching said video, or I'll have spent an evening editing rather than dying under a duvet for NOTHING.  

On that note, I think it's time for me to get into my pyjamas, crawl underneath the duvet and watch The X Files.  Hopefully tomorrow, the elephant tap-dancing on my head will have taken up a gentler pastime.  Like... Yoga.

COMMENCE DUVET ACTION!!!!

The Kindness of Strangers...

Today is Mother's Day, here in the UK.  Last year, I wrote a very personal piece about being single and having reached my thirties, without having had children.  I talked about the fear that it might never happen for me and the hope that I haven't, as some callous people like to say, "left it too late."  I called it "Mother's Day and The Ache of Childlessness", because nothing else seemed to sum the feeling up, besides calling it an "ache."  A year on, I'm still in the same position, but with the added weight of knowing that I'm a year older and still single and that the chance of one day knowing what it feels like to have a little person call me "Mummy" might be drifting further away.  Obviously, I hope that's not the case and I do try to stay positive about my chances of meeting the right person and, at some point in the future, having children of my own, but you do hear so much about it being harder to have kids after a certain age that it's something it's difficult not to think about.

Anyway, as is my tendency, I re-shared last year's blog this morning, as it felt appropriate.  I shared it on Twitter and on Facebook, then I also shared it on Sarah Millican's Facebook page, as she'd written a post sending love to anyone who might have cause to find Mother's Day emotionally difficult for any reason.  I didn't think much more about it after that, as I had a lot to do today (trip to the shops, writing a bedtime story for future release on this blog and recording said story as a podcast for a start), but then something unexpected happened.

Throughout the day, I've been receiving messages and comments from people I've never spoken to before.  And those messages have - unanimously - been supportive, empathic and sent with love.

Me and my wonderful Mum.

We hear so much about people being mean to each other on the Internet that it almost comes as a shock when people use it to say something kind, instead.  It got me to thinking about the power we all have to make the decision to reach out to a stranger, just to offer support.   None of those people who sent nice messages knew me.  None of them felt duty bound to offer a kind word out of friendship, or family ties.  They had literally all just read something, empathised with it and decided to say something supportive as a result.  And whilst they may never have given it a second thought once they'd clicked "post comment," or "send message," their words had enormous power.  They had the power to completely change the way I was feeling.  They had the power to make me smile and feel as though I wasn't alone.  They had the power to give me hope.

We all lead such busy lives and it's much too easy to see social media as just an endless stream of people, blurting their opinions out into the ether.  It's much too easy to scroll past someone saying they're feeling a bit low about something.  After all, we go online for a bit of escapism, right?  Who needs another person's problems bringing them down?!  

But who knows how we might have helped that person we chose to ignore?

Offering a kind word doesn't really take any time at all, online.  "I hope you're okay.  Keep your chin up, I'm here if you need to talk."  Typing that sentence just took me less than thirty seconds.  It was nothing - a drop in the ocean.  But to someone who really needed to hear it, it might have been the world.

It's not just online, either (obviously!).  Today's events really made me think about how simple it is to read a person's emotions and to just listen when someone needs to talk.  It takes no effort at all to ask "are you okay?"  We don't have to know the person really well.  We just have to show that we care.

We live in a big, busy world, in which we encounter strangers in real life and online almost every day.  But whoever we are, wherever we're from, we're all just people.  People with hopes, dreams, fears and worries.  Sometimes, just offering a stranger a smile, asking how they are, or taking the time to send them a supportive comment online, can absolutely make a difference to that person's day.

Having been on the receiving end of the kindness of strangers today, I'm making myself a promise to be that kind stranger for someone else.  Pay it forward.

So, next time you see a stranger online saying that they're feeling sad, maybe take the time to ask what's wrong.  Offer a stranger a smile.  Hold a door open for someone carrying a lot of heavy bags.

We may all be strangers, but just by showing a little kindness, we can close the gap between us and remind ourselves that really, humanity is a community and it never hurts to support someone who needs it.

To all those who sent me their personal stories as inspiration today, or who simply took the time to send me positive vibes: thank you.  You've inspired me to be that person for someone else.  I dedicate this blog to all of you.  x