After 9/11, when flying became a lot more hassle and a lot less fun, I remember seeing posters in airports encouraging travelers to say something to airport personnel if they saw an unattended bag or something unusual. Advocating high-alert attention to everyone and everything only added to an already stressful situation, but an incident in our local park recently made me think about the idea of noticing and saying something in a different light.
I was walking my dogs through the maze of sidewalks in our smalltown park. One of the sidewalks goes beside a small toddler playground. As I was walking by, I heard a small voice say, “Your dogs are a-DOR-able!” I looked over to see a little girl, maybe three years old, balancing on a beam and peering over the low fence at me. “Hey, thanks for saying something!” I said back to her.
This little girl’s comment reminded me of the poem “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver.
“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”
My first encounter with the saying “If you see something, say something” was a negative one. It required me, if I decided to fly somewhere, to watch for something wrong, something out of place. But my encounter with the toddler girl showed me that this was not the only way to carry out these instructions. I could see something and then say something good, something encouraging. There are plenty of things going awry in today’s world, and we should say something. But we can’t only focus on the negative. That’s not how a life is lived or at least lived well. So be like that three-year-old: if you see something a-DOR-able, say something. You’ll feel better, and you’ll make someone else feel better, too.