Who has not found the heaven below
Will fail of it above.
God's residence is next to mine,
His furniture is love.
Emily Dickinson
In the end, only kindness matters.
Jewel, singing “These Hands”
Hello Reader,
Got kind and loving?
Recently I was thinking about Self Improvement. Something I lately realize: Improvement leads to Achieving One’s Potential, which leads to achieving kindness: The real potential. This new idea I gleaned from a famous blogger, Penelope Trunk. I was fascinated by her post Living Up to Your Potential is BS (footnote) from August 2008.
I would hope that being filled with kindness could lead to expressing love.
Meanwhile, an even more famous lady, Hollywood’s Kristen Bell, notes that love can be a superpower. And she would know, since she voices Anna, the girl who’s sister Elsa, in the kingdom of Arendelle, has a superpower over ice and snow: In Frozen, the Disney movie.
Speaking of “sisters,” if my name was Sister Teresa I suppose I would know all about kindness, and move on to India and become Mother Teresa. Then I could blog my knowledge about kindness back to you. But no, I am only me… all I can do, from various sources, is glean knowledge for being kind and loving, and then share. Here’s Penelope—her post starts with a photograph of a man in bed with a sheet over him, reading a book crudely titled How to Get Up and Get Dressed
QUOTE
(After being optimistic enough to get out of bed)
The next big goals we have are the spiritual kind: Be good, be kind, treat people with respect. You probably don’t write these on your to do list, but now that you read them, surely you are thinking to yourself, “Oh yeah, I want to remember to do that.”
Living up to your potential is not crossing off everything on your to do list on time, under budget. Or canonizing your ideas in a book deal. Really, no one cares. You are not on this earth to do that. Trust me. No one is. You are on this earth to be kind. That is your only potential.
And then you have to earn a living.
UNQUOTE
So heartening! I could do that.
You are probably wondering what Kristen said. As it happens, in an interview with Mark Daniell, in the Calgary Sun, November 17, Mark asked:
“My niece had a question when she heard I was talking to you. She wanted to know if the new movie is going to answer why Princess Anna doesn’t have powers?”
QUOTE
She does have powers. Her power is love. Her power has always been love. Anna has always had the strongest power of all. You may tell your niece that.
Personally, I’ve walked through life feeling like I have a superpower because I’ve practiced trying to love everyone around me and it has filled me up with a ton of self-esteem. But I love when I’m good to people. I love it. I love that about myself. That might sound selfish, but I sleep so well at night being kind to everyone around me.
It’s not to say that I don’t have bad days, I do. But when people ask me that question I always tell them: Anna does have a superpower and that power is love.
UNQUOTE
So inspiring! I could practise being loving.
Of course I could always work on becoming wealthy, of course. But if one day I meet you after making my first million, wearing a broad imported silk tie, and a big wide platinum lapel broach, then I would hope that what you would remember about me, later, is not my success in achieving affluence, but my success in becoming kind and loving.
And wouldn’t that be a worthy goal down through the new year of 2020?
As long as I’m gleaning wisdom from people more rich and famous than I am, let the last words be from a man my own age, Peter Capaldi, in his character as the twelfth Doctor Who, “summing up” before his time runs out:
“Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.”
Sean Crawford
Calgary
January
2020
Footnotes:
~For a follow up, you might like my post Be Kind to Clerks, archived November 2019.
~Here’s Penelope Trunk’s blog post.
~More on Doctor Who’s end-of-life summary of his motives:
From his final episode, The Doctor Falls, on that fated day when he has no hope to see the next sunrise, comes this long video clip. He is a near-immortal, pleading for help from the only other near-immortals he knows.
He says, “if I stand…then maybe some of them might live, maybe not many, maybe not for long, but then who does?” This in the context of him having seen many mortal generations grow old and perish—but he has always hoped not to harden his heart to ephemeral humans. And me, as I get older and crankier I retain such hope too. The Doctor remained loving. The Bible says “Greater love has no man…”
(Private note to young precious fans: Peter Capaldi and I are old enough to remember when the TV ending credits listed “Doctor Who,” so that can be a time lord’s name, a name used by Peter in TV interviews)
~From the other sister, with her superpower here (the sing-along-version) is her most famous song.
~And OK, I’ve linked to her before, but here is Jewel’s most famous song.
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