Positive Pensées
Kathy King
The Gift of Fingerprints
“Our fingerprints don’t fade from the lives we touch.”
Judy Blume
A fingerprint is unique to both you and to me.
When we leave a fingerprint, we leave a part of ourselves.
If someone were to take a microscope and look at the prints you left.
Would they be of edification and good intent?
Even when we don’t realize it, we leave prints of ourselves everywhere.
To the stranger in the store, the coworker that feels ignored.
Our fingerprints can leave a mark, to help those who have lost heart.
When our day is fraught with stress and strife, try to pull up the fingerprints that have made a mark on your life.
Those little patterns that we both receive and leave everywhere certainly must contain little idioms and road maps that can help us navigate through everyday life.
Stop and take a moment, pause, and reflect.
Some fingerprints don’t necessarily need to remain, but we can take a small lesson from the brief frame.
Those fingerprints, those patterns, will they fade with time?
Let us hope they make an indelible mark that will survive the test of time.
Did you know that fingerprints are almost exclusively unique to the person with the print? They are quite difficult to alter and endure over your whole life. Your print is unique to you. That is why when an investigation is undertaken by detectives they immediately search for fingerprints. That print can lead to their perpetrator, their victim, or people who are present when the activity takes place. Even when you burn your finger or have a cut this does not alter the ridge structure of the fingerprint (except in quite extreme cases). That is pretty amazing. Fingerprinting was a science that started in the 1800’s but really did not take off as a means of identification until the 1900’s. Fingerprinting became widely used by Scotland Yard at that time. There are 8 different types of fingerprinting patterns used by the FBI in investigation. Suffice it to say, your fingerprint defines you and you alone. In life, we leave our fingerprints all around us and adversely we also are the recipient of many fingerprints. When you think about the circumstances of your life, do you dwell on those circumstances that left a bad print in your life? Is that where you spend your time? Or, do you process that bad fingerprint, solve the offense and file it away as solved? We all do it, we think about a situation that caused us grief. Some folks do so to their great detriment. What if we make our peace, even if we did not understand the circumstance or how it came to be, mark that file as solved, file it away and dust off the prints from your life. Also, what kind of prints are we leaving with others? Our family? Our friends? Our coworkers? Even the stranger we encounter at the store. We have often heard from people who are in the customer service sector talk about that “difficult customer” that just made their day a bit terrible? Those were fingerprints. Recently we had the occasion to fly on a relatively short flight, it was about an hour and a half. The boarding process began, it is a bit hard not to feel like cattle in modern day flying, am I right? As the plane was almost completely boarded my seatmate looked at me with a great look of relief! The middle seat was empty! We could spread out and enjoy ourselves as we sailed through the skies. Suddenly a woman ran into the plane out of breath and of course, her seat was in the middle of our row. To say that this woman was polite would be completely and utterly wrong. She was demanding and rude because I did not get up fast enough, unbuckling and letting her into the seat. After she sat down she fussed and carried on. My quiet seat mate and myself immediately put on our headphones in hopes that we would not have to listen to her upsetting lamentations. As the flight was underway it looked as if the mood was calming down. The flight attendant came through with snacks and drinks, and the lady began to once again complain. At first, both myself and my seatmate wanted to roll our eyes but we decided to listen. Our quite upset seat mate was upset because she was a diabetic, she had not been able to eat her breakfast due to New York City traffic, she was scared she was going to miss her flight to see her son (who cares for her) and she just wanted something to eat. While the in flight snacks are not the best, my seatmate and myself handed her our in flight snack. That small act by the two of us caused this woman who was completely closed and over it all to bloom with a smile. What is the moral of the story? We never really know what is going on in someone’s life…. but that small fingerprint of kindness helped a random stranger make it through her day with a small sliver of hope. Our fingerprints may not stay with others but they may stay with us to teach us how to start a movement of gratitude and compassion for others.
Source:britannica.com
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