Small acts of care, seeping in through the ether, to remind us that we are safe and loved.
Sometime at the beginning of 2023, in the coldest part of winter, I quietly opened the door to the bedroom of my two-year-old daughter, Leah.
With the light from the landing spilling in, I quietly stepped across the bedroom to her bed and reached down for her duvet.
The duvet - as it had been on most of the previous few days, and would be for many days following - had been kicked off. I lifted it and gently settled it onto her, tucking her in and keeping her warm.
And on this night, as I stepped away and looked down on her, I was taken out of my singular experience. I noticed that she doesn’t know, may never know that this happened to her. Night after night. Often me, sometimes her mother. That year, and maybe many more.
These small acts of care, seeping in, perhaps, through the ether, through the pores in her skin, to remind her that she is safe and loved.
But not only her.
As so often in my first three years as a parent, my reflections on Leah (and then Gabriella) have become reflections on me.
How many times was I tucked in, unknowing until now? How many times were you?
And not just me and you.
When I shared this idea with my friend Mike, he told me how he, every night, would pad downstairs to his daughter’s bedroom to settle her duvets down on her after she had wriggled out of them.
And not just duvets.
One of my favourite, almost inexplicable, experiments - apparently replicable despite how confounding this is - goes something like this: a group of very ill patients are divided randomly. Half of them are then prayed for by people who don’t know them in another part of the world. Half are not. The half who are prayed for have better outcomes.
And not just prayer.
When I spoke to Kim Morgan, founder of one of the biggest coaching training organisations in the UK, she reflected on supervision that happens among coaches (and also counsellors, psychotherapists and social workers). A group of care-workers sitting around, supporting one of their number to support one of their clients.
This person never knows that two, three, five, six people sat together for an hour or more, thinking deeply and caring about them. About their life, their struggles, about how they might be helped.
No less beautiful, really, than a duvet laid on a sleeping two-year-old girl.
For all the bad news in the world, we exist in a net of care and love.
From the past, in the present… and in the future, too.
We never know who is thinking of us, caring for us, thinking about how to help us, how to support us.
About how we might be.
And we don’t know the impact of our thoughts and prayers.
As a part of my practice of telling the truth - or, particularly, of not lying - I catch myself every time I start writing ‘best wishes’ or ‘sending love’ or ‘wishing you a peaceful Christmas’.
I pause.
And I actually send those wishes.
I lay a blanket of love, briefly, on the woman in Colorado, or the man in South London, or the group, scattered across the country or the world.
It changes me, always.
(And who knows what it does for them?)
It focuses me and reminds me that in every moment I can be an act of love.
I can be the person who slows down enough to find the moment to lay the blanket, gently, on the sleeping girl.
Or, I can absent-mindedly type empty words at the end of an email. Which will be skimmed over absent-mindedly by the person reading it.
I know which ripples Indra’s Net in the way I want to ripple it.
The rituals we have - the tucking in, the signing off messages, the Christmas cards. They can all be a gesture done simply because it is done.
Or, they can be an act of love.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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