Someone a little nicer

A little bit of eccentric kindness from me today, inspired by a wonderful story I recently read about Gandhi. (Allow me to sidetrack for a mo to tell you I actually read it in the book, 365 Steps To Practical Spirituality, which I spotted when I was leaving a favourite book for someone to find, a dozen or so posts back – how I love the circularity of this exercise!)

The story goes that one day Gandhi was boarding a train when one of his shoes fell off and down the gap onto the tracks. Unable to reach it, he took off the other shoe and threw that down the gap too.

“Why did you do that?” a companion asked.

To which Gandhi replied that anyone finding one shoe is no better off. But finding a pair they have stumbled on a gift.

A life lived backwards

It’s a great story; it may even be true (though I always thought Gandhi wore sandals). What it says to me is that:

• opportunities to be kind are around us all the time
• sometimes our misfortune can be turned into someone else’s good luck
• even when we are being spontaneously kind it helps to engage our brain.

I’m not sure the achilles tendonitis I’ve been suffering from since last November counts as misfortune. More like stupidity. I doubt my tendons would have seized up in protest if I hadn’t gone through a four-year high heel period in my early 20s ( at the time my calf muscles became so foreshortened I couldn’t get up a hill in flatties without walking on tiptoes or walking backwards).

This leg abuse was compounded in my 30s by spending 360 days of the year physically idle, and 5 days marching my body up mountains. And in my 40s by running several Great North Runs without doing the proper training.

Brought to heel

Hence the knotty bits on my legs,  which now severely restrict the sorts of shoes I can wear if I want to be able to shuffle downstairs to the kettle in the morning in less than five minutes.

I clearly hadn’t engaged my brain a few weeks back when, heady with excitement about having found the perfect party dress, I splashed out on a matching pair of strappy, four inch heeled sandals.

I realised the error of my ways before I even left the house and the shoes have been at the bottom of my wardrobe ever since.

In Gandhi’s honour, I have stuck a heart-shaped ‘help yourself’ post-it note on the box and intend to leave the sandals for some lucky soul (sorry, couldn’t resist that one) . While,  trying not to dwell on whether, by encouraging someone’s addiction to high heels, I’m condemming them also to a life walking uphill backwards.

As I’m discovering, it is possible to overthink kindness…

And while we’re on the subject of vanity (well why else would anyone have invented high heel shoes?), check out this quirky website Operation Beautiful, involving guerillas with post-it notes, on a mission to convince us we’re perfect as we are, knotty heels, shuffling gait and all…)