“Make your actions match your good intentions.”
Too often the demands of life keep us from completing the tasks we wished for or would accomplish, if we made the time.
We are overwhelmed with hectic schedules, appointments here and there and other things that consume our lives and keep us from being Good Samaritans.
The quotation above, listed in Barbara Ann Kipfer’s book titled, “8,789 words of wisdom,” creates a sense of urgency to make your actions match your good intentions.
We often plan to give grandma a call to see how she is doing. Or pick up our neighbor’s paper when she or he is out of town. But we just never seem to get around to do it.
Something always beckons our attention.
Maybe we are choosing to ignore those simple things.
It is interesting how we can go through life and never develop relationships with the people that we are physically close to. It disturbs me when people do not know the names of their neighbors, yet they spend years living beside them, or when people only see or call relatives and friends on holidays or birthdays.
I am guilty of all of this as well, but Kipfer’s words made me consider: “I am not really that busy or preoccupied to do a small kind gesture every once in a while.”
In the April 12 issue of in the Winston-Salem Journal, columnist Nigel Alston highlights what he thinks has divided our society. He said that ethnicity, income, city versus suburb, and red state versus blue are a few on the list of “invisible dotted lines” we have established. “We don’t get below the surface to really know each other,” says Alston.
But at the end of the day, do these things really matter? Everyone responds to kindness.
This past weekend, I made a card for a friend, just to say I care. I stopped and talked with my neighbors instead of giving the usual wave. I found out something interesting: People really appreciate kindness and thoughtfulness. It makes me feel better too.