This Momentous Day

Today it’s been 2 years since Gumby died. The world still feels shit without him!

I was wondering what to write & looking through some old photo’s & papers when I came across a scrap of paper from many years ago. I’d written this down after being incredibly motivated by it in a book by Dean Koontz – From the Corner of His Eye. I think it’s something we could do well to remember in our every day lives & I know it would have resonated with Jeremy.

Not one day in anyone’s life, is an uneventful day, no day without profound meaning, no matter how dull & boring it might seem, no matter whether you are a seamstress or a queen, a shoeshine boy or a movie star, a renowned philosopher or a Down’s Syndrome child. Because in every day of your life, there are opportunities to perform little kindnesses for others, both by conscious acts of will & unconscious example.

Each smallest act of kindness – even just words of hope when they are needed, the remembrance of a birthday, a compliment that engenders a smile – reverberates across great distances & spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo, because kindness is passed on & grows each time it’s passed, until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage years later & far away.

Likewise, each small meanness, each thoughtless expression of hatred, each envious & bitter act, regardless of how petty, can inspire others, & is therefore the seed that ultimately produces evil fruit, poisoning people whom you have never met & never will.

All human lives are so profoundly & intricately entwined – those dead, those living, those generations yet to come – that the fate of all is the fate of each, & the hope of humanity rests in every heart & in every pair of hands.

Therefore, after every failure, we are obliged to strive again for success, & when faced with the end of one thing, we must build something new & better in the ashes, just as from pain & grief, we must weave hope, for each of us is a thread critical to the strength – to the very survival – of the human tapestry.

Every hour in every life contains such often – unrecognised, potential to affect the word that the great days for which we, in our dissatisfaction, so often yearn are already with us; all great days & thrilling possibilities are combined in THIS momentous day.

Or, as her father often said, happily mocking his own rhetorical eloquence: ” Brighten the corner where you are, & you light the world.”