76 // via HTC Evo: Small acts of love
I realized today, or rather, I was reminded today that it’s not the big, huge occasional things that add to our happiness. It is instead the small frequent acts that contribute most to our personal joy.
Yes, yes, Cliff. Of course. Isn’t that after all the whole premise of this blog? Seventy-six posts in and you still hadn’t got it? Honestly. Time waster. Months not blogging, and this is the crap he comes up with now. Well I never.
Fair enough criticism. I stand in the spotlight revealed in all my hypocrisy.
The thing is, it’s easy to confuse talking about the things that make you happy with the things that make you happy themselves. Or things can make you happy you just don’t feel like talking about. Or. plainly, you can just be unhappy, a state out of which nothing, big or small can move you.
I see it as a pendulum, on one end of the arc, a nihilistic void or meaninglessness, Hamlet’s “sterile promontory.” On the other, well … Charlie Sheen comes to mind. An unholy glut of meaning, divorced from all reality, of selfishness and self-absorption so deep, so all-consuming, nothing can penetrate it and which moves forward with the interminable destructiveness of the juggernaut.
I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make here.
OK, here’s my point, by way of anecdote. It’s that true love and compassion lie in the effectuation of small acts of love and compassion. Not the big ones. Not the grandiose. And those small acts, taken over a lifetime, are what is meaningful.
Like saying, “I love you,” and meaning it. And saying it every day.
The anecdote: Alex, my daughter gave me a note she’d made, the one pictured above. It was for no special occasion, nor was it particularly flamboyant. But it said something deeper than its simplicity. And it made me profoundly happy. In fact, it made us both happy. There’s something rather wonderful to be said about that.
