Tag: kindness alert

Kindness Alert: Snowblower People and Shovel People Unite

We got walloped by that blizzard I mentioned yesterday. It left about 5-8 inches at least with a gift mountain about waist high on one side of our driveway left by one of the city plows. Later in the day another plow gifted us another driveway plug, not as tall but wetter and heavier.

This morning we shoveled hard and it must have showed. Three of our neighbors came over with their snow blowers to help dig us out. We were very grateful for their kindness. One of them must have been up before 5 AM to get started. Another powered her way through a good chunk of our driveway. Yet a third neighbor helped clear the gift mountain and more.

I think I may have got in the way a few times because I felt a little guilty about them doing so much work with their machines. I felt compelled to sneak in and scoop something because I felt terrible just standing there watching them.

In the afternoon we had to get back outside to clear the second driveway plug left by the second city plow. Our driveway had drifted in about to my hips. It took us a while to dig out.

Some have speculated about whether shovel people take unfair advantage of the generosity of snow blower people. After all, we tend to look kind of pathetic, so they probably take pity on us.

There might be an expectation in some neighborhoods for snow blower people to contribute to the community by being willing to go the extra mile and clear driveways for shovel people. I could find only one serious article on the internet about this, “Is There a Social Code for Snow Removal?” on the Scientific American web site.

I’ve not heard of shovel people coming to help snow blower people, but it happened this afternoon. After Sena and I cleared our snowdrifts, we visited the three neighbors who helped us this morning and scooped out their driveway snow plugs and a little more when we could.

Thank You!

Loving-Kindness Meditation in the Real World

Today is the first day of Martin Luther King, Jr. Human Rights Week and I’m giving a shout-out for acts of kindness as well as the Loving-Kindness meditation. A neighbor with a snowblower helped clear our driveway a couple of weeks ago. A couple of days ago he did the same for his next-door neighbor. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate the city snowplow driver was kind enough to avoid plugging the driveways on our street. No kidding, we watched the snowplow use what was obviously a different plowing technique which left our driveways relatively clear of snow.

The Loving-Kindness meditation is a mindfulness practice that Dr. King would probably have supported. It’s a way to send love to yourself and others, including those with whom you might be in conflict—even your enemies. King might say, “Now is the time” for something like that.

I’m reestablishing my mindfulness and exercise practice after a several month lapse. I first took the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course several years ago through The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. It made a difference in how I approached problem-solving and conflict. I was on autopilot most of the time and wrote a blog post about my experience before and after my mindfulness training experience, “How I left the walking dead for the walking dead meditation.”

Part of that program included instruction on the Loving-Kindness meditation. I’m still a beginner at mindfulness, although my approach to life is still ironically more like the expert’s in Shunryu Suzuki’s quote:

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”–Shunryu Suzuki

I need to keep working on being more open to different ideas, interpretations, and ways of getting things done—approaching challenges with a beginner’s mind.

One recent challenge is hanging pictures. Sena and I hung a picture yesterday. I wanted to measure everything and she wanted to estimate. She had misgivings about my measurements but went along with it. After the picture was hung, even I had to admit it was not in the right spot. Funny thing, after a short while, she admitted that the misplacement was not that far off and that she was getting used to it. If you’ve ever hung pictures, you know I’m leaving out a lot of the back-and-forth negotiation about how we finally arrived at that middle ground. It involved loving kindness on both sides.

We’ll see how the next picture hanging goes.

Kindness Alert!

This is just a brief announcement—a Kindness Alert. This past Saturday, we got our first load of snow of the season dumped on us, which meant we had to go out and shovel. Our driveway is pretty big. We don’t have a snowblower. This means we were out there about an hour and a half powering our way through a few inches of wet, heavy snow.

And naturally, that meant the city snowplows plugged in our driveway shortly after we went inside, foolishly congratulating ourselves on a job well done. I think there must be some kind of local ordinance requiring all driveways to be plugged with snow right after the homeowners finish clearing them. I’ve posted about this before.

But then as we watched from our front window, our neighbor interrupted his own snow removal work to clear off our driveway plug and then some. In fact, he used a snowblower and a shovel! He spent considerable time on the job. It was an impressive act of kindness. I remember wanting to rush out in the cold to thank him.

Little did I know that I would have the opportunity to return the favor. Shortly after our neighbor finished, another snow plow rumbled through and dumped more show in our driveway and even spread it around more generously in other places near the curb—and even shoved snow over the curb on the lawn. By that time, the stuff had frozen into small boulders of ice and mud.

I plodded outside again and cleaned it up. Then I noticed that the snowplow driver had also piled more snow on my neighbor’s side. In fact, I did return the favor—sooner than I thought I would.

A big shout-out for my neighbor’s act of kindness!