Special

I met this girl named Jessica today. With reckless abandon for all things socially acceptable, she walked up to me, yelled “hey!” and gave me an encompassing hug. I needed that hug and I think maybe somehow she knew that. We conversed like we’d known each other for years. She goes to the same high school I went to. She is just so darn nice.

She was a competitor, I, a volunteer, at the Special Olympics in Provo. This basically means I was a designated clapper/cheerer for the athletes. That’s the easiest job I’ve had all week. Most rewarding too. The athletes never told me I wasn’t a very talented clapper or made me feel sub-par or annoying. They looked me straight in the eye and smiled like they meant it. One guy was dancing, one guy repeatedly shook my hand and made me feel welcome.

Abraham Lincoln once hypothesized that there’s no unselfish deed. I think the concept was, even if you’re doing something for someone else, you know you’ll benefit in someway. So, it’s not selfless. I’ve thought about that on several occasions. And I think it has truth, particularly in this case. To me, the task is to find the unselfish deed, and in the process do a lot of good things for other people.

I went thinking, “Oh, I’m going to help,” (and, in truth, “Oh, I have other things I could do today”), and I had more fun than I’ve had in recent memory. I felt lighter, better, like I’ve done something that meant something. Not because I love helping special needs kids. Let’s be honest, that’s not my strongest character trait. But because I learned from them to just have fun. To love whomever, whenever. To retrain the focus from things I can’t change to the great life I have.

Mark Twain said, “Let us so live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.” I want to be that. It is a war within me to combat the temptation to be the natural person who only thinks about herself. “The natural man is an enemy to God…” and selfishness thoroughly fits that bill. My needs. My pain. My agenda. At the close of mortality, we’ve lost this life test if that’s the focus we’ve maintained. Today, those things didn’t matter. It felt good. It felt right.