“We honor the interdependent web of all existence. With reverence for the great web of life and with humility, we acknowledge our place in it.” 
—Bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Article 2, section C2.2

We’re sitting at the kitchen table, where my niece is telling me about her day at work. One of her co-workers went through a break-up. In a collective effort to buoy her spirits, the team encouraged each other with a call-and-response chant: one would call, “I Am!” and everyone else would respond, “An Independent Woman!”

“I Am!”

“An Independent Woman!”

All day long, peppered between customers, cheering each other up and cheering each other on. Taking a sad moment in life, acknowledging it, and turning it around to proclaim and celebrate what we can be.

I’m enjoying the story, and then my niece says to me, “I was thinking of you all day.” I blink. Wait, what? I have no idea what she’s talking about.

My niece reminds me of a day six months earlier, when she was in a similar place and I gave her those words: when I asked her to loudly and repeatedly proclaim, “I Am! An Independent Woman!” I gave her the mantra to hold on to, to remind herself of a truth. (“I am!”) She took that truth and embodied it; passed it along when a friend needed it. I like to think that it will get passed along again (“An Independent Woman!”) to someone who needs help remembering that they’re powerful.

I believe it is both a blessing and a curse of humanity that we will never truly understand how we affect each other. We can’t know that the retail clerk we snipped at became grumpy and snipped at a chain of other customers, or their children, and eventually someone had a meltdown because we forgot breakfast and were hangry.

But we also can’t know that the person we smiled at—the random stranger whose clothes we complimented—was buoyed, and started a long chain of day-brightening smiles, compliments, and cheer.

We don’t know the negative impact we have on the world, and we don’t know the positive impact either. We simply move through the world doing our best and hoping that we did more good than bad, or at least balanced it out.

Prayer

Spirit of Life, help me be at peace with knowing only my small part of the story. Help me to do the small good things that I can and to give grace when it’s needed, both to myself and to others.