Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.
~ Thomas H. Huxley, English Biologist, 1825 – 1895
I work from home 3 or 4 days a week and only go into the office the other 1 or 2 days each week. I am very fortunate to have this work arrangement. But this means that some days, I work at home all day and am not actually out in the world interacting with people. This can make it difficult to find ways to be kind to others when I don’t encounter anyone outside of my family all day – challenging, but not impossible.
Today, I decided to take advantage of the suggestions from Facebook and send birthday greetings to two of my friends on Facebook. I will admit, this is not an extraordinary act of kindness. In fact, I do this often. But I don’t do it every day for every one of my friends who is having a birthday that day. There have been times when I’ve seen the birthday list for the day and thought “I don’t really know that person well enough to wish them a Happy Birthday?” Today it occurred to me – Just how well do you have to know someone to wish them a Happy Birthday? As a server, I wished perfect strangers a Happy Birthday everyday in hopes of increasing my tips. But there doesn’t have to be anything in it for me to pass on a simple birthday greeting. And I didn’t do it thinking that MY specific birthday greeting would have an impact on the person or their day – I just wanted to add to the collective group of wishes that they hopefully received from many people in many ways that day. It was about increasing their total number of birthday wishes received by one. It took very little time or effort and cost me nothing – when I thought about it, I was a little embarrassed that I had actually passed up these opportunities before because I thought I “didn’t really know the person well enough.” All you have to know is that it’s their birthday – and I didn’t even have to keep track of that myself because Facebook reminded me. It’s a kindness that has been staring me in the face for years and it’s one I won’t pass up again.
