The Power of Positivity
Yesterday I passed a woman at the traffic light on the way to the market in Mauritius. She had a broom, a bucket, and a radiant smile. She was cleaning the street, but with great joy. I have always been impressed by the power of people to rise above the humble and humdrum roles they occupy and radiate joy.
A shining example of this is Larry, the after-hours security guard at my former organization. Many security guards sit quietly at the entrance, making little eye contact, and only speaking when they are spoken to. Not so Larry. Larry started work when everyone else at the office was ending their day. As they passed by hurrying to get home, he would reach out with a greeting, a smile, and often a fist bump. He asked people about their families, he chatted about the weather, he discussed the sports news and how favorite teams were doing, and had candy to offer the occasional child who came to the office with a parent.
Larry was possibly the most connected person at the organization. On more than few occasions, I saw the CEO stand at the door for 5 or 10 minutes chatting with Larry. The CEO was certainly a very busy man, but Larry gave him and everyone else passing by something valuable. Larry made them feel that they mattered.
At the Global Citizen Leader program that I ran in India with MBA students, I spoke about Hazel Chatman who I had read about in the New York Times years ago (https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/a-public-bathroom-transformed-into-a-gem-by-the-beach/). Hazel is a sanitation worker at Brighton Beach, New Jersey. She had a job keeping the park clean and loved being out and about on the job. One day she was reassigned to take care of a public restroom. It wasn’t the job she wanted and a dank public restroom at a busy beach is not the best of places. But Hazel didn’t lament her situation. She flipped it. The public toilets weren’t the place she wanted to be, but she would make it a place that would be meaningful to herself and beautiful to the world.
Hazel kept the place sparkling clean. She used her own money place curtains in the window, scented soaps in the dispensers, and historical pictures of the beach on the wall. Visitors who darted in expecting to hold their noses while making the quickest of stops, stopped in their tracks. This was no ordinary public restroom. Rather than dash out feeling sullied, they lingered on, feeling uplifted. Hazel made their day a bit better. She, like Larry, turned a tedious job into an opportunity to bring a little measure of unexpected joy to others.
Mother Theresa wrote, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” The Indian sage Ramakrishna stated, “The flower blooms and the bees come.” In both these expressions, there is a call to act with purpose and love and let the rest take care of itself. Larry, Hazel and the street sweeper in Mauritius live these messages out loud. They inspire me with their gentle example. They may not be household names but they are changemakers who are improving the world from the small spaces they have been assigned — the security desk at the office, a restroom at the beach, and a city street. If they can turn the rather tedious and mundane work that many of us would flee from into transformative experiences, what is possible for many of us?
Life is not always pleasant and we may find ourselves time and again in challenging circumstances that are not of our choosing. Yet these too are opportunities to bloom, nonetheless. In doing so, we place our wellbeing not in the seemingly callous palm of fate but in our own hearts and hands. And invariably the light we hold out for others shines upon us too.
