A Little Something to Warm Your Heart

| By: Committee for Children

Have you ever felt on any given day that the negatives were hard to overlook? Maybe you woke up and read about a sad event in the news, or upon arriving at work you listened to various co-worker complaints about their challenging students.  Driving home, you may have come across an angry driver with road rage, or someone at the grocery store who cut in front of you in line.  Then, perhaps during dinner, your children got into a heated argument. Although days are not always like this, there are times when the positive things are not so easy to see.  

While having one of those not so great days recently, I decided that it would be interesting to focus my energy toward the positive. So, I committed myself to a project in search of finding some of those positives in action. Once I truly made an effort to look for these happenings I was amazed at how commonplace they were, and how they occur among adults and children in the most surprising of situations.

Each of these moments made me feel delighted and excited about all the work that we do to help children to promote their connectedness and social success, because that is the type of effort that promotes more positives, such as the acts of kindness and empathy I saw when taking the time to notice. Although I witnessed many more positive interactions than I could describe in just one blog, here are some of the highlights.

·   A young child sets his candy bar down to open the door for an elderly woman at the grocery store, and then says “Have a nice day.”

·   During a birthday party, a boy notices a girl who is playing alone, so he invites her to play with him and others.

·   A woman loses her keys in a department store and several employees help her search the aisles, eventually finding them for her.

·   A young girl asks her sister after school, “How was your day today?

·   A woman expresses her frustration toward a man in a restaurant, and he responds by giving her a hug.

·   The best of my moments came when my niece said “Thank you for spending time with me!” Oh how something so simple can brighten a day!

Take some time to ponder and cherish a few positive moments you have experienced recently. May they, too, inspire you!