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Making Waves By Jeanne Spiro The alarm doesn't go off. No time for breakfast. Get to work late. Can't do this without that. Need to go to the office supply store, go to the post office on the way back. Now it's even later. Everyone is so slow. The only thing you can do is bark along the way and make your unhappiness known to all. Who wouldn't? You get mad, but "it doesn't really matter, right?" One person's actions can't possibly make much of a difference. Sue's at the post office and this maniac who hasn't planned his day well is grousing. Since she didn't get much sleep, it's easy to get sucked in. The kids are fighting in the car, she's yelling, other drivers are really stupid. The lady in the grocery store is picking pennies out of her wallet and making Sue crazy. By the time she checks out, she's had words with the checkout lady, who is in turn short with the next person in line. While walking into the store, Bill sees a harrassed woman with two kids. She looks like she's had it. After packing the bags and the kids into the car, she just about rams him with her cart. Instead of getting mad, something shifts and he tells her, "I'll take it, I need one anyway." He smiles and tells her to have a good one. She smiles back, uncertainly at first and then says, "You, too." We tend to feel and act as if we're in a vacuum, and that the effect of what we think, say and do stops just after it's thought, said and done. What if that's not so? What if that energy just keeps going? What if it ripples on and on, from person to person? If the average person encounters at least thirty people in a day, and each of those people encounter thirty and those thirty another thirty, that comes out to 27,000 people. That's a sobering number. Is it possible that to some degree we affect that many people every day? It could be. The reckless, horn-honking driver encounters a lot more than thirty cars on the way home. A mailman delivers to many more than thirty houses. At an outdoor festival in the summertime, one person sees thousands of others, and each encounter, even if just a glance, produces a positive or negative impression. Someone in a snit, loose in public, impresses each person in his or her sphere with a little negative hit. Every friendly nod or smile creates a little positive hit. Angry outbursts or outgoing friendly connections create bigger hits. Unless consciously overridden, a hit is accepted and passed on. The pool we swim in every day is filled with thousands and thousands of emotional hits fired by people like us who, for the most part, are not conscious of their impact. In the course of any day, we are targets of hits from people we don't even know. More importantly, people we don't know are targets of ours. What if we, those of us who define ourselves as being on the path, decide to refuse to accept negative hits and no longer pass them on? That would short-circuit things. What if we go a step further, take responsibility and stop generating our own negative hits? Wow. What if we get really nuts and greet each person we see with a friendly nod, a smile, or a compliment? If each of the tens of thousands of people who read this magazine each month have at least thirty encounters a day and those thirty have thirty. . . it gets to be truly staggering. We tend to look to the big things in life for changes, but mostly it's little things, lots and lots of very little things. |
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