The ripple effect of kindness rarely announces itself. It doesn’t arrive with fanfare or a plan. It showed up at my door late on a weeknight, apologetic about the traffic, carrying bags of TPN for my husband Curtis.
Her name was Melinda. And before she said much else, she crouched down to say hello to Roo.
That got me.
You can tell a lot about a person by how they talk to a dog. Roo is not subtle about his opinions, and Melinda passed immediately. She mentioned she teaches pet CPR courses. She had business ideas she was clearly excited about. We talked for a few minutes at the door the way you do when someone shows up in the middle of your ordinary chaos and you realize, almost by accident, that they’re carrying a little chaos of their own.
I don’t know exactly what I saw in her. Something seeking. Something that had more in it than the moment it was standing in.
Before she left, I went and grabbed a copy of Today I Choose to Be and handed it to her. “I don’t know if this will help you,” I said, “but I wrote this and it helps me. It’s a good way to improve every day, a little bit at a time.”
She took it. I didn’t think much about it after that. That’s the thing about choosing to be kind. You don’t stand over the seeds.
A Month Later
About a month later, Melinda got assigned to our house again. She came up to the door and the moment she realized which patient this was, her whole face changed. “I’m so happy I got the delivery to your house! Oh my gosh, I love your book. I’ve shared it with my whole women’s group. My sister loves it.” She was genuinely fangirling, which is honestly one of the best feelings in the world… particularly when you wrote the thing at 5 in the morning before anyone else was awake and you were pretty sure nobody was reading it.
I told her how much that meant to me and let the warmth of it in for a second before the rest of the day swallowed it up.
Then a few weeks after that, an email came through the Enlightenzz website. A woman who said her daughter had gifted her the book and she wanted me to know how much she loved it and how grateful she was.
I knew before I even finished reading it. That was Melinda’s mom.
I don’t know how I knew. I just knew.
Tonight
Melinda came by this evening to drop off Curtis’s TPN. I mentioned the email. Told her I was pretty sure that was her mom, and that the message had made me feel like a million dollars.
She smiled and said, “Well, I have to tell you… I’ve been posting on TikTok every morning. The word of the day, and how I’m going to show up that way.”
I watched five of them after she left.
She was not holding up my book. She was not crediting me or doing any of the things that would have made it about me. She was just… living it. Making it hers. Turning one word at a time into something she was sharing with whoever showed up in her corner of the internet that morning.
Each TikTok made me happier than the last.
That is exactly what this whole project was for. Not to sell books. Not to build a platform. To give someone a language for their own becoming and then get completely out of the way.
(If you want to see what that looks like in practice, Melinda is at @favorminded_cpr on Instagram. She is doing something beautiful over there.)
The $43 From Japan
A couple of months ago, right in the middle of the hardest season of our lives (Curtis in and out of the hospital, me running on coffee and prayer and whatever adrenaline the body manufactures when there is simply no alternative), I got a deposit notification.
Forty-three dollars.
From Japan.
I genuinely did not know the book had gone to Japan. It just appeared in my account one day like a note slipped under the door of a room I didn’t know anyone else could find.
I did not care about the $43. I want to be really clear about that. I cared that somewhere in Japan, a woman had picked up something I wrote and found value in it. That she had decided it was worth her money and her time and her attention. That my words, which I had wrestled out of myself in the dark, had traveled to the other side of the world and landed.
I remember feeling something I still don’t have a perfect word for. Not pride, exactly. More like connection. Like being a synapse in something much bigger than yourself and realizing, for one clear second, that the signal actually went through.
What Seeds Do When You Stop Watching
I gave Melinda that book because she seemed like someone who needed it. Not in a presumptuous way. In the way you recognize a fellow traveler. The way you hand someone an umbrella because it’s raining and you happen to have one. It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t me being generous in any calculated way. I just saw a person, had a thing that might help, and handed it over.
It wasn’t strategic. It wasn’t a marketing move. I wasn’t thinking about reach or conversion or any of the words I probably should think about more than I do. I just saw a person, had a thing that might help, and handed it over.
And then the book went and did what books do when you stop watching them.
It went to a women’s group. It went to a sister. It went to a mother in another city who found the website and sent a note that made me tear up a little. It went to a TikTok feed where someone shares her word of the day every morning and genuinely means it.
And across an ocean, it went to Japan, where the $43 that showed up in my account felt like a letter from a stranger who just wanted me to know: the signal got through.
I have been building Enlightenzz for a long time. Some of it has been loud and deliberate and strategic. Some of it has been at 5 AM when the house is quiet and I am not sure anyone is listening.
But the pieces that have mattered most, the moments that have made the whole project feel worth every single early morning, have not been the ones I engineered.
They have been the late-night door conversations.
The impulsive handoffs.
The emails I wasn’t expecting.
The deposits from places I didn’t know I’d reached.
You plant things. You try to plant good things. And then you have to trust that the ground knows what to do with them, because you will not always be there to watch them grow.
Melinda is out there every morning, telling her people how she’s going to show up today.
One word at a time.
That’s the whole thing, right there.
If any of this resonates, you might also enjoy how gratitude practices can quietly transform your life — or start your own daily intention practice with the full Today I Choose series.
