“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless” (Mother Theresa)
✨I have always loved a good old quote & a poem. At a talent show one year I recited ‘The Mouse’s Tale’ by Lewis Carroll (yes, I was THAT kid). I had a big poster of Max Ehrmann’s ‘Desiderata’ up on my wall and i used to read it to myself over & over until I had learned it off by heart. My love for poems & quotes grew with age & I started keeping journals where I wrote out my favourites ( I still have them)
During a big basement purge, I found the journals and had a good old trip down memory lane reading through them. I rediscovered one of my favourites, a poem by William Childs called ‘Alabaster Boxes’:
“Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up, until your friends are dead.Fill their lives with sweetness.Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say them before they go.The flowers you mean to send-use to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them.If my friends have alabaster boxes lay away, full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection I would rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered when I need them.Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit.Flowers cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.”
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✨This line had such a profound effect on me: ’The kind things you mean to say when they are gone, say them before they go.’
Such a simple lesson, and yet one that is so easy to forget. I try really hard to make a point of telling people that I love them, no matter how vulnerable it may make me feel. I give compliments, even when I may be feeling envious, it helps me to release some of it & the more I do it, the less envy I feel.
💫‘Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them’
How often do we scroll through our FB feeds, or work our way through the newsletters in our inboxes, and find things that we enjoy or that resonate so strongly with us? How often do we see a post on Instagram by someone who have been following for a while, think to ourselves how brilliant they are and how much we love seeing their posts and YET we so often don’t stop and make a point of TELLING them how awesome they are?!
✨Be a Radical Complimenter. Scatter sunbeams & moonbeams & rainbows & fairy dust like it’s going out of fashion. Dont wait. Dont keep all those beautiful words to yourself. Be generous, set them free & you may just brighten someone’s day/week/life with your kind, genuine words.
💛And to the beautiful people who sprinkled their compliments on me this week by replying to my last post- your words lifted me more than you can imagine.
Thank you.