Changing the world from the supermarket car park
Something very little but lovely happened today.
I needed a shopping trolley but didn’t have a pound coin to put in the trolley-release-thing. A man who had earlier walked passed me and must have heard me talking about it with my son, came back to us after entering the supermarket. He took a ‘shopping trolley token’ off his set of keys and gave it to me with a smile, telling me to keep it.
It made my day. I was, just for a moment (in betwixt the splashy, overflowing car park and supermarket groaning with overpriced and over packaged - stuff), full of gratitude and joy.
Those two emotions have not always been present this year, so I really notice them when they arrive. Like much missed friends knocking at the door, I welcomed them in with hugs and relief. My heart softened and a warm glow seeped across my flesh. Momentarily at least, I stopped feeling rushed and thinking about my ever present mental list of undone things. Just for a moment I felt kindness endorphins trickling through my blood and my weary body smiled under its woolly jumper and M&S cords.
In this moment, I was reminded how physical and wonderful and UTTERLY POWERFUL, random acts of kindness (however little they are) can be.
And then it crossed my mind, is it possible that these little, random acts of kindness are the antidote to all the thoughtlessness, vitriol, misery and despair that’s piled up around us in the news, along the high street and on social media? Is it possible that these tiny touches of decency could mount up enough to counter all of the heaps of human anguish that seem to me as unmanageable, unpalatable and mournfully conspicuous as rotting rubbish during a seemingly never ending refuse collection strike? Is it possible there could be cure in here somewhere?
Sorry folks for my despondent take on where the world is at right now, but I am tired. It’s the end of what feels like a very long year and it’s not been a great one. One our dear departed Queen might have labelled on my behalf, an annus horribilis.
That said, I know it’s been better for me than many other fellow humans in our world. Indeed, I keep saying to myself “at least I don’t live in Gaza, or the Ukraine, or Yemen, or Afghanistan or, god forbid, the polarised, gun-toting, fundamentalist religious hotbed that is, America!”
I try to stay clear of the news but it’s so all pervading, even on my usually favourite ‘place of inspiration’, Instagram.
I made the mistake of recently following all the algorythmic prompts and signed up to Instagram’s version of X, Threads. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it’s just so awful. It’s just more of the same old, same old twitter-like social media slurry. A real ‘cess-pit of humanity pool-party’ with dissociated people hurling around inflammatory content about heinous political and military stalemates. To my mind, only for the sake of getting viral eyeballs on their feeds. Angry people ranting and berating each other and entrenching themselves even more firmly in positions of antagonism or defence depending on whatever stance they might be taking on whatever polarised issue of the day is the discussion point.
I’m so rung out by it all and tired of it and right now… just very saddened. And yes, disappointed in humanity.
I went to see Napoleon the other evening (highly recommend - definitely a modern classic and very possibly a contender for an Oscar nomination or two). During the scene in which jeering revolutionary crowds bayed and threw rotten vegetables at Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, I was struck by how we humans as a species, have progressed very little in ethics or behaviour in the last two hundred and twenty four years. My visits to Twitter (sorry X) and Threads show that on the whole we have apparently learnt nothing from the eons of painful historical studies in abhorrent tales of man’s (and woman’s) inhumanity to (wo)man.
So when my children innocently ask me curiously challenging questions about the why’s and wherefores of what’s going on in the world today, I find it hard to speak un-jadedly.
But I do try to find hope and sense in things, at least for their sake.
I’ve reduced my insights for them down to something along these lines…
As the little people we can usually do very little about the big issues of our day. As mere cogs in the wheels of our fading industries we have little say in the evolution of our governmental policies and economies. As entirely expendable cannon fodder for blood thirsty and gung-ho field marshals high on the wins and losses of the battles of their forefathers, we cannot (alone!) fix the generational geo political problems that transcend time by throwing our weight around on social media. It just adds to the noise, aggravation and despair.
Forgive me for sounding like a pessimist. I’m not. I do still have slithers of hope, I promise.
And, it is this hope that I want my children to be filled with.
It is in this ever-burning belief in the incremental power of small, intentional acts of kindness that I can honestly share hope as a cure for all global-ills with my children. It’s the very visceral knowing that just by doing ‘the next right, little-thing’ often…. we can go along way to cumulatively fix the (at first look) ‘little’ problems (the big problem being that these little problems often compound themselves into very large ones over time!) It is through being kind to our neighbours, being thoughtful toward strangers or through reaching out meaningfully to people we care about but may not have seen or heard from recently, that we have the power to change the world for the better and to change it SYSTEMICALLY - albeit from the supermarket carpark.
By doing something as small as giving a shopping trolley token to a random frazzled mum on a rainy Christmas Eve eve in a supermarket car park anyone can change the world for the better, give another human the gift of hope and bring light to an otherwise dark, mizzly day.
Or you could of course offer your stable conversion up to a pregnant refugee with a donkey in tow and see how that ends up changing the world?
