Have you ever stopped to think about the impact you have on other
people’s lives every single day? Sometimes it’s tangible and you are fortunate
enough to see the evidence of it, but in many cases you will never know how
something you did or said has touched a person’s life.
Somewhere out there is a woman
who through the simple act of hand-raising an orphaned Kangaroo changed my
life.
As a child it was clear that I was an “animal person” but one seemingly
inconsequential moment turned animals from an interest into a life’s passion and
career for me.
On one of my family’s regular weekend jaunts to the Gold Coast, Mum and
I went to browse the shops while my Father and Brother stayed at the beach to
make the most of the waves. At one shop
we wandered into, there was an orphaned kangaroo joey peeking out from the back
room. I was instantly besotted with this little creature which was only just
learning to stand up, and sat on the floor watching it wobble, scratch and stretch while
my Mum perused the dresses. The shop assistant explained that she was often
called upon by the local wildlife sanctuary to look after the orphans until
they could be released back to their natural habitat. I was so taken with the
joey that I demanded my Mother take me to the sanctuary on the spot and find a
joey for me to take home and hand-raise (there are so many things wrong with this given what I know now!)
After some clever verbal sidestep, we drove home sans orphan, however
my wonderful Mother sought a more suitable outlet for my new passion. The
following school holidays I started as a volunteer at Lone Pine Koala
Sanctuary. I loved every minute of it and spent my entire weekends and much of
my school holidays there until I was old enough to be employed. That was the
start of over 10 years working in zoos, a zoology degree, and a further decade
(so far) of educating others about animals and the environment and training similarly
passionate people to pursue a career in the industry.
Fast forward to a few months ago, when a little voice inside my head
said “start a daily Face book post called 100 days of gratefulness”. I’m not
entirely sure where this voice came from and why it was telling me this, but I
have been working on paying closer attention to my intuition. So for the next
100 days I wrote a daily post about one thing I am grateful for on Face book. This
is nothing new, plenty of social media pages exist where people are doing
similar exercises, usually to help promote a book or inner peace or something.
My purpose was simply to honour my directive, nothing more, so it never
bothered me that I didn’t receive a huge number of likes or comments. Over the
last few weeks, however, so many of my friends and family have taken the time
to inform me that they enjoyed reading and gained so much from my 100 days of
gratefulness posts. I didn’t realise just how many people were actually reading
them!
If someone has had a positive effect on your life and you haven’t told
them yet, what are you waiting for? There may come a day when you wished you
had have but it’s too late. If it were possible, I’d so love to track that shop
assistant down and show her just how many lives she has touched!
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