The section I’ve been reading for the last week or so in my Book of Positive Quotations has been “Helping Other People”, how coincidental (a word of convenience, I still haven’t decided on a new word to replace it) considering my earlier posts on blessing others.
Last week I started working on a project; it’s a Guidebook for 2007 (I’m really very proud of it actually), it is full of lists and goals and things to “guide” me through the next year. I asked myself questions about my life goals and my dreams, questions about who I want to be and where I want the next year (and the rest of my life) to lead me. One of the things I discoverd answering all these questions was that blessing, or giving to others, is really important to me.
I’ve lived at least half of my life (so far) needing others to be generous with me just to get by. (I suppose, in truth, we all need others, but some of us can get away with thinking that we don’t.) I know, more than anyone else, that I’m where I am today because of the generosity of others. So, more than anything else, I want to be able to do the same for other people, who, like me, need others. Generosity is important to me.
But, I’m not quite as generous as I’d like to be. I mean well, but being generous isn’t instinctive to me yet. I still need to learn to live more genrously. Then I realized, how better to learn generosity than by being generous.
All of this thinking has made me decide that I’d like to ammend my blessing challange to myself. I don’t want to just bless ten people over the next few weeks, I want to teach myself to watch for people I can bless all the time. Which is why I’ve decided to spread my challange out over the year.
My new goal is to bless a minimum of one person each month (the key being finding a person I can bless). I don’t want to stop at one person, should the opportunity come to bless one a week, then that’s how many I’ll bless. But, I don’t want to be too amibtious; I am after all a Blesser in Training; I’d rather aim low and hit my target than aim too high and become discouraged (a good lesson for goal setting by the way). So, by December 2007 I’ll have blessed a minimum of twelve people, but, even more importantly, I’ll have gotten into the habit of keeping my eyes and heart open for opprtunities to be a blessing. Which is after all, the real goal.
I was pondering all this when I came across an exercise in a book I was reading. The exercise wasn’t intended to be used for lessons in blessings and generosity, but as soon as I read it I knew it was the perfect tool for the job. So, just in case you’ve decided to take up some level of my blessing challange for yourself, here’s the (slightly ammended) exercise for you to try for yourself.
Be a Blessing Exercise
Make note of any problems you see people having, or hear people complaining about. (I have a little notebook I carry around that would be perfect for this exercise.) Then brainstorm as many possible solutions as you can to their problem (aim for five or more). Look at the solutions – is there something there you can do for them? Now do it!
This exercise isn’t perfect. Obviously, it’s not helpful for those immediate, the woman at the counter is short $5, opportunities; you don’t actually need a list, or maybe, don’t have time to make a list, for some of the blessing opportunities you’ll find. Also, I suppose, there will be some cases where what you can offer isn’t really going to make a dent in the problem. But that’s ok, because the goal of the exercise is to learn to see opportunities to bless more than it is to act out the blessings; after all we can’t act on them if we don’t see them.
It’s not exactly the same scope as my original challange, it doesn’t feel as big and exciting to me, but I’m still excited about it. I’m excited because I think it’s like the “Teach a man to fish” idea… In the long run I’ll be producing way more blessings with this plan (think of next year, and the year after) than I would have with my short-term project. And, that is exciting.
