Summer, we barely knew ye…
Here I am at the end of yet another summer, and I feel like I finally had my cliché “coming-of-age-in-your-own-hometown” summer. Part of me feels like that’s a ridiculous thing to say, but most of me feels like it had to happen. I had my “coming-of-age-through-world-travel” summer last year, so it really makes sense that the hometown epiphany happened this year. It served me well, and I learned a lot (almost as much as last summer). I could make you a Nick Hornby-style list (Top Five Things I Learned This Summer (in no particular order)), but I think both the writer and her audience would be much better served through a single thought that has resounded in my consciousness throughout the summer:
I want to be a blessing, not a burden.
You’re probably asking yourself, “Kaleigh, dearest, where did this profound thought come from?” Well, let me explain…
The Sunday before my pastor left to do some mission work this summer, he asked our congregation to pray that we would be blessings to others. One of those wake up in the morning, get down on your knees and pray, “Lord, please let me be a blessing to someone today,” kinda things. So I did it. I’m not sure that I was a blessing to someone every day this summer, but I like to think that most days, I was a blessing to at least one person.
I think it started with a simple question: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” This one question marked the first time that I ever put in a conscious effort to get to know a co-worker I never see outside of the workplace. I didn’t ask to be a smart-alek (my co-worker is a bit older
than I am, so clearly the “what do you want to be” question had already been addressed), I asked because I genuinely wanted to know what brought her to work at JCPenney. For the first time, I acknowledged the fact that the real world is not like most of the the fictional world; it’s more like in Tom Perrotta’s Little Children: everyone is a round character, there are no flat characters. Not really.
That one question resulted in an all-day conversation that I guarantee would not have occurred otherwise (and it certainly helped an otherwise monotonous day of bra-sorting pass quickly). It seems like such a small thing, but really, that was huge. All it takes is asking questions, showing interest. I know, I know. I’m wearing my Captain Obvious super suit under this. This is stuff we talk about in teacher education courses all the time, and they make it seem like rocket science (have them interview each other, ask them the histories of their names, make them complete surveys or tell what their favorite books are). It’s as simple as asking a question to which you sincerely want to know the answer. I didn’t care what my co-worker’s favorite book was (at the that point in time), but I did care what brought her to JCPenney. And oddly enough, I am kind of curious now to know the title of her favorite book.
In my life, being a blessing has been about seeing outside of myself. It is so easy to live my life as the heroine of my autobiography (soon to be a major motion picture!), but it’s much more fulfilling to pull my nose out of my own book and put it into someone else’s. It’s much more fulfilling to ask a simple question to show that I care and am interested in the people with whom I spend most of my waking hours, than it is to be lost in my own head all day long.
The major lesson of this summer: I want to be a blessing to at least one person a day. Hopefully, it’s more, but one a day is a nice starter goal, right? And I promise it won’t be like those nasty “I can only please one person a day” t-shirts. Besides, I feel blessed when I try to be a blessing to someone else. There’s no better feeling than that.
