I saw a meme on Facebook a few days ago that has been weighing on my mind ever since.
I follow quite a few pages dedicated to spreading positivity and kindness.
I have always believed strongly that we should treat people with kindness, but never more so than since my brother died by suicide in the summer of 2021.
The message I saw, in the wee hours, with sleep still clouding my old lady eyes (so close to forty, you know — less than six months now! 😉) was a quote from Gemma Troy, set on a background of old-timey-looking paper.
Remember, your words can plant gardens or burn whole forests down.
— Gemma Troy
I read that and I thought, how easily we forget the power of words.
The saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me” was such a crock of garbage. I have no idea where that came from, but it is very far from the truth.
Words can, and do, hurt all of us.
I would imagine the original point may have been that words can’t kill us, perhaps?
But the truth is, they can.
Look at the suicide statistics in teens and young adults, even some younger than that, and they are often linked back to cyber bullying. You can’t use sticks or stones over the internet, so obviously, words cause plenty of damage.
I am also the member of several suicide awareness groups, and there is a staggering number of kids who took their own lives because of unkind things their peers said to them.
Words clearly hold more power than we sometimes realize.
Did the children doing the bullying have the goal of killing their victim? Very unlikely. Almost impossibly low odds of that. And yet, they did kill them.
The choice they made, to use their words to hurt rather than heal, had consequences that the families of their victims will never recover from.
Words have power.
Small things matter.
Kindness is never the wrong choice, and it is never wasted.
What if you choose to extend kindness to someone and they throw it back in your face, so to speak?
Even if they rejected your kindness, your ability to extend it helped you grow, so it’s still not a waste.
Kindness says something about you, about who you want to be as a person, so how could acting on improving yourself ever be a waste?
I read a story about small acts of kindness, and the woman writing it had experienced a truly life-changing event, through one small kindness her mother extended to a stranger.
Sometimes it takes only one act of kindness and caring to change a person’s life. — Jackie Chan
The woman telling the story had suffered with fertility issues, and she and her husband were still mourning the tragic loss of two children to stillbirth.
The emotional toll had grown so much that her husband decided he no longer wanted to pursue having children, even through adoption. It had just become too much.
The woman disagreed. She wanted children more than anything, but she had to respect her husband’s feelings as well.
Her mother met a young lady through her church, and she struck up a conversation with her. She was all alone, and her belly was just beginning to swell, the telltale sign that she was growing a new life.
Finding out that the young woman had no family and had just moved to town, the mother invited her to dinner with their entire family that Sunday night.
The young woman accepted, and it blossomed into a friendship with the entire family. She had come from a background where love and support didn’t exist, so she exclaimed over how wonderful their family was.
It helped them renew appreciation for each other, to reflect on how fortunate they were to have those blessings in their lives.
Months passed, and the daughter who was telling the story, who lived in a different state than the mother and the young woman, received a phone call from her mother.
As this woman was mourning the loss of her children and trying to let go of the idea of ever having the family that her heart yearned for with every breath, this young woman was worrying that she would never be able to provide the kind of life she wanted for the child nestled inside her, who was growing bigger and stronger every day.
As you can likely imagine by now, having grown to know and love their whole family, this young woman asked if they might want to adopt her baby, and that little girl is now being raised in a huge extended family and is helping her parents heal the trauma and pain of their losses.
Because of one “small” act of kindness.
A dinner invitation.
Remember, there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end. — Scott Adams
Never doubt that the things you do, the small ways you extend yourself to other people, matter.
You never know what wheels your kindness might have set in motion that you don’t even realize.
Words matter.
Kindness is always the best choice.
Peace and love, y’all.
© Melissa Gray 2023, All Rights Reserved
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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Photo credit: Derick McKinney on unsplash.com