What’s Working: Creator of Moments 8 comments

10 Apr 2008 @ 19:35, by David Bartholomew [excerpted from DoingIt!, February, 2007] I consider myself a Creator of Moments— one who throws out a pinch of magic dust into an everyday situation— a conversational tidbit, a zig where one would normally zag, a fat pitch of a comedic straight-line— a real zinger— tossed right over the sweet spot, dead over home plate for someone else to hit out of the park. My job description here is to create opportunities for us all to transcend the ordinary, ho-hum, hum-drum, mundane, same-o-same and be the better for it. There is no accredited training program for this. One must become a journeyman and test it out on the journey, man. As a Creator of Moments I have been pleased to see that I must descend from a line of them… as I am witnessing the work of my brethren and sisters (sistern?) shaking it up all over the place. In a run of work out West of-late I have stayed on-occasion in currently-under-construction Topanga Canyon. This windy road has been being repaved section by section, curve by curve, to the consternation of many, for a reasonably long time. In the opposing corner, however, has been this saint of a fluorescent safety-vest wearing, road crew goddess who has blessed, and wished good and great days, and smiled a cloud-clearing smile and waved happily at everyone who has driven past her. I stopped and turned around recently and had to get her name and tell her how much she is appreciated. Kim Dungee, who could just be shoving that spare hand in her jeans pocket and dutifully flagging everyone by because it’s her job… is instead transfiguring even the most jaded, tattered-script-toting, self-absorbed, Porsche-driving, latte-drinking, producer wannabees of the canyon… from mumbling, grumbling, clock-watching, stuck in second gear monsters of rudeness… into sweethearts. She, as my character in “The Penny Man” -– who turns up face-down pennies, leaving all that good luck for others to find—is skirting around the law that for each and every action there is an equal and opposite reaction… and turning the asphalt, morning drive equation of a root canal appointment… into nothing but warm fuzzies. She is a saint in the sun. She bakes so we can wake. Alright—she probably doesn’t need me to coin her an ill-thought-out slogan. The point is—how many times, in how many places… are we on auto-pilot? How many times do we just go about our business and leave well-enough alone when we run up against someone who isn’t well, might be feeling alone… and it could be within our power to help them shift… with us receiving perhaps more out of the exchange? I know, from our brief meeting and brief chitchat in the middle of the road, that Kim has a lot more going on, intentwise, than she lets on. Hers is a mission— a one-woman plan to tidy up her corner of the world and, hopefully, I assume, to have those well-wishes and happy na-na’s be passed forward by whatever means by their grateful recipients. And I am for this becoming a movement. As Arlo Guthrie advised in “Alice’s Restaurant” (in reference to protesting the draft, but you can make the mental leap)— You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really sick and they won’t take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they’re both ____ [insert word, no longer politically correct, here] and they won’t take either of them. And if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin’ a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it’s a movement. So, like-minded friends-- sign on the dotted, or polka-dotted,or zebra-striped line, to join the Creator of Moments Movement. Go to ordinary places and kill people… with humor, kindness, joy and peace. A-men.

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