Little Traditions

   Thanksgiving is the perfect time to reflect. It is the one time of year where the entire country is geared toward appreciation and gratitude. What simple miracles are in your life today? What do you do to celebrate these miracles? Many people talk about keeping gratitude lists, but what else can you do?
     One of the ways I try to build family bonds is through traditions. Wonderful memories are created through traditions. What better time to talk about traditions than the holidays?  

Small, simple traditions are, in in fact, little miracles. Traditions bring people closer. Here is an excerpt from my new book Simple Miracles.

   Once in a while, at midnight, Tess will wake me up -- or I'll wake her up -- and we'll go do our thing together. We call it our "midnight snack." We'll run to the kitchen in our t-shirts and sweats and raid the fridge. We huddle together in bed spilling crumbs and sometimes bottles of water. She asks me to wake her up every night for midnight snack and once in a while I do.
   This tradition reminds me of a sweet coffee shoppe Skye and I walked to while on vacation one summer in Martha's Vineyard. We'd walk to the cafe' to get our morning croissant. It was called Espresso Love. What makes this memory sweet? Skye couldn't pronounce espresso so she says  "special" instead. Each day she'd ask, "special love Mama? special love?"
   Even after we left the Vineyard and said goodbye to the morning walks to Espresso Love, I still carry those "Special Love" memories. Part of our traditions include talking about stories like this one. Children love to hear stories about themselves told and retold. It helps create their living history. I love sharing these little moments with my daughters - these little moments add up to this big thing called life!

Simple Miracle: What miracle moments do you share? We have midnight snacks and special love.

New Book Release: Simple Miracles

Simple Grace by Beth Jannery | Make Your Own Book

Pay it Forward

My college students at George Mason University did something amazing this week. For an experiment in interpersonal communication, we broke into small groups and came up with ways to express gratitude. First, I read a story to the class from my new book Simple Miracles (to be released in two weeks). The story, in a nutshell, was about the concept pay it forward.

All it takes is for one person to do something nice (say something, make something, help with something, the ideas are endless) to create a positive reaction.

The students then put it to the test. The results were beautiful.

All morning I heard story after story about little one-on-one scenarios that played out through the week on and off campus and in the lives of my students. Each group of students (in 3-4 clusters) came up with a different approach, but all had the same result - they passed on love, friendship, gratitude and smiles (one group literally made construction paper smiles). Part of their assignment was to track the results and present their findings.

We all left the classroom smiling. We have more findings to report, but our project is already a success. I find the concept of creating a positive chain reaction to be an amazing thing. It was wonderful to watch it build from an idea into a tangible action.

But where did it start? The origin of "pay it forward" actually goes back to a play from ancient Athens from 317 BC, but the concept wasn't rediscovered until much later. One stunning example comes from a letter written by Ben Franklin in 1784:

I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro' many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.

A trick indeed. This trick, concept or expression we refer to as pay it forward is meant to benefit another person, ideally a stranger. It is a form of alternative giving.

The expression, pay it forward, is used to describe the concept of asking that a good turn be repaid by having it done to others instead. In contract, typically there are two parties but there is the concept of third party beneficiaries. Pay it forward merely applies this contract law concept so that third party beneficiary be a stranger to the creditor (or obligee). More specifically, the creditor (obligee) offers the debtor (obligor) the option of "paying" the debt forward by lending it to a third person instead of paying it back to the original creditor. This, according to a clear definition I borrowed from Wikipedia.

In the end, pay it forward is nothing new. In fact, we can find examples of this alternative giving in literature. In Emerson's 1841 essay Compensation:
"In the order of nature we cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody."

Then this, "You don't pay love back; you pay it forward," from Lily Hammond in 1916.

And now, a handful of new examples of pay it forward can be added to history from an energetic collection of college students in Virginia. What have you done today to make someone else smile?