What Can You Do Today?

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are." ~ Theodore Roosevelt

A few days ago I had an interesting conversation with my mother and a friend who stopped by to see us. We were discussing good deeds, and my friend said that she loved to help others, but hardly had the time to devote herself to any kind of charity work. My mother, who doesn’t speak much English, waited for me to translate, and then simply asked her: “Do you ever leave your house?”

My friend looked a little puzzled, and replied that indeed she is always gone from dawn to dusk, running around all the time. My mother then said: “Well, then, your life is full of opportunities to help others”.

After that short conversation, we went out and I was stunned at what I had the chance to observe. We stopped by to see my husband at work, and in the parking lot I noticed an elderly lady struggling to get out of her car. I held the door for her, and helped her out of the vehicle. Right after that, I saw a delivery man who tried to open the door with arms full of stuff – opening the door was a small gesture for me, but it certainly helped him a great deal. I spent the rest of the day really observing people and situations nearby, and was astonished at the number of situations I normally would not have noticed.

We are so used to program every moment of our lives that we often overlook the opportunities that abound in the unplanned moments of our days. Regardless of what we do, where we are, who we are with, we all have the opportunity to help with something – an old lady may need help loading grocery bags in her car, a colleague at work may need help making copies, someone may need help picking up something they dropped.

No act is too small. Mother Teresa once said that a small act of kindness is indeed like a tiny drop in the ocean, but the ocean would be less without that single drop. Similarly, everything we do for others makes a difference; it may not be a difference that is readily visible, but something has been changed because of it, nonetheless.

We can start today. Let’s go out into the world and see how we can serve, merely for the sake of spreading a ray of sunshine into someone else’s corner. As we do so, we will allow that light to enter within the dark recesses of our own soul as it is impossible to shine a light for someone else and not be guided by it ourselves.

Let’s not wait until tomorrow to do something nice - let’s start today, this hour, this minute; right where we are, and toward whoever we are with in this moment. Let’s spread a word of encouragement, a smile, a single touch, or even a little spare change to someone who needs it more than we do.

No matter what we do, let’s do it without expecting anything back. What we receive from that small gesture may surprise us after all.

What Might Have Been

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” ~ George Eliot

It is never too late. I can’t recall how many times I heard that phrase growing up. I believe it must have been my parents’ favorite thing to say, because it seemed to follow every sentence they uttered each time my sister and I worried about something.

Indeed, no matter how many mistakes one has made, or how many times things have gone wrong, or opportunities have missed their chance to manifest, luck, circumstances and attitudes can always take a sudden turn.

I once read of a lady who had always wanted to go to college, but never had the means when she was young. Being the oldest of eight children, she was, at first, too busy helping her mother raise her younger siblings; after that she married and started a family of her own.

When her husband died she was nearly seventy-five years of age, and her children had all grown and moved out. It was time for her to decide what she was going to do with the years she had left – for once in her life she had no one to be responsible for but herself. If she looked back to the days of her youth, her only regret was to not have received a college education. So she decided to make up for that.

She enrolled at the local university - although family and friends tried to discourage her plans - and for the next four years she diligently took all the credit courses she needed to graduate in business management. By the time she graduated she was seventy-nine, but she proudly posed for photos on her big day.

She was never able to put her skills to use, since she was too old for employment and died just a few weeks short of her eightieth birthday, but for almost a whole year she lived knowing she had crowned her dream of being a college graduate.

Some of our ambitions may be more modest than those of the lady who graduated, but if they are important to us they are worth pursuing. We may not achieve the full extent of our dreams, but can be creative as we try to get close to the original idea.

I’ve always believed that where there is a will there’s a way, and as long as our plans do not harm anyone on the path to being fulfilled, we shouldn’t hold back or tell ourselves it is too late. And maybe what we might have been can still become who we are.