Ten Cookies

This post isn't really about cookies, per se.  For a week I've been considering writing about the sad and horrific events in Newtown, CT.  To be honest, I don't have the words, the vocabulary, the writing skill, the strength of emotion or character, to say anything about it that would do justice to the lives that were taken.  A nation grieves, my friends and family grieve.  I personally cannot even view the videos or news articles about it because I feel like I might burst from the well of despair I feel boiling in my chest.

I was talking to my best friend, Glen, this morning. He knows me well enough to know that issue-avoidance is my MO in situations like this.  We've been through it before with Columbine, the attacks on the World Trade Center, and nature-made but no less devastating, the tsunamis in Thailand and Japan, and, sadly, other world events.  We touched on it briefly in our conversation and I said that I have such a hard time forcing myself to remember that in spite of it all there is still much good in the world.  He shared such a sweet quote with me that I have to share:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers.  You will always find people who are helping,'" Fred Rogers wrote in the Mister Rogers Parenting Book.

That's right. THE Mister Rogers.  You can read the full Huffington Post article here.

In that vane, Glen's wife took up the 26 Acts of Kindness cause. This movement suggests performing one act of kindness, no act too small, for each of the lives lost in the Connecticut shooting.  We chatted about some of these kindnesses and I was struck by one of Carol's ideas.  She asked Glen to stop by the coffee shop he frequents and pay for 10 cookies.  Then he asked the shop owner, Wayla, if she would randomly and anonymously distribute the cookies.  Sounds pretty simple doesn't it?  Ten cookies.

But those ten cookies have now touched Carol, and Glen, and Wayla, and the ten people who will receive them, and me in the retelling, and my blog readers, and the people the recipients tell.  Who knows...those recipients may choose to pay it forward and gently touch countless other lives with the kindness and goodness that exists in people.

I think I'll head to the bakery down the street and spread some kindness myself.  Ten cookies.

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