The BRIGHT SPOT Awards: Origin Story

The first BRIGHT SPOT Award, before I was even calling them by that name.

Friday, September 1, 2023

Question: What are The BRIGHT SPOT Awards?

Answer (Reader’s Digest Condensed Version): The BRIGHT SPOT Awards is a challenge I created for myself. If a stranger does anything (directly or indirectly) that makes me smile, I give them a little handwritten note thanking them for being a bright spot in my day.

And now, in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, I present you with ‘the rest of the story’.

Sadness and anxiety weighed upon me like a millstone across the chest in early 2021. I had been out of work for over a year. My job search was going nowhere. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was caught in a vicious circular conversation with myself.

You need a job.

Yes, I need a job.

Look on LinkedIn.

Hard to use LinkedIn or any of those other job boards when you don’t know what you’re looking for. What the heck do I plug in for search parameters?

Look for jobs within a five-mile radius. Start with an easy commute.

Well, ok.

[Looks for jobs within a five-mile radius. Gets overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the results. Starts looking at admin and finance jobs. Feels hopeless. Cries. Stops looking.]

[One week later] 

You need a job.

It was a paralyzing experience.

My dear college friend Jana (writing coach extraordinaire, Set Your Muse on Fire!) let me know she would be offering a workshop called Fanning the Flames: Using Writing to Launch Your Dreams. I signed up and started writing.

Every day I would complete the exercises, and every day the same sentence would appear: “I enjoy talking to strangers.” After what seemed like the umpteen-trillionth time of reading those words, I’d had it. [Cue internal monologue.]

“Oh, this again. ‘I love talking to strangers, blah blah blah.’ I’m sick of hearing it.

So WHAT? What are you going to DO about it?”

My brain immediately took the talking-to-strangers idea, added to it Jana’s mention of a 100-day challenge, then topped it off with the memory of the random awards I had printed out with some spare bits of card stock, stirred vigorously. And there it was. The first iteration of the BRIGHT SPOT Awards.

Aside: I feel the need to highlight this moment. Because I am something of an expert at thinking about doing stuff and never taking action. My capacity to let ideas come and go without ever breaking ground (or even getting out of the chair to go to the shed and grab a shovel) is limitless. To have reached this breaking point within myself is noteworthy. To have come up with a plan is amazing. To have then put the plan into motion that very day is a flippin’ miracle.

Every day for 100 days, I would hand out awards and record my experiences on my blog, Late Bloomer’s Digest.

In the winter.

In the middle of a pandemic.

Obstacles appeared right off the bat. There were days when I didn’t actually see any strangers on the street. Then there were days when I left the house for my temp assignment and didn’t come home until 12 hours later. I started to bend the rules in order to stay on the 100-day track. I gave the occasional award to someone I knew. Sometimes I’d run to the store and hope to hell an award-worthy moment would occur. On one memorable occasion I realized I hadn’t given out an award yet and it was already 9:00 pm. I was flinging the front door open to scurry out into the dark when Isaac asked, "Are you going to look for a stranger?" He must have heard me say "I have to go out and find a stranger!" a handful of times by now. Humor from the seedier interpretations of the phrase aside, I found it sad. Absent of spontaneity and joy, the project was reduced to a chore, one at which I felt I was failing. I decided to extend the timeline. Then I extended it again. And again. As of today, I am 940 days into my 100-day challenge. I have finally come to accept that finishing, whenever it happens, is still an achievement.*

I also struggled with the fact that my writings about this project tended to be more about me than the recipient. I had to ask myself why I was doing this in the first place. The award may be for the other person, but from the beginning I knew I needed to let go of the outcome. I had no idea how people would react when I first started. Even today, after so many of those kind folks told me I had made their day, I still make room for the possibility that someone may respond with fear and/or suspicion. That’s okay. It is absolutely their right to react however they will. And, while I love and admire Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York, this is not that. A staggering number of these awards go to people who are working – grocery store clerks, baristas, retail associates, waitstaff. They’re busy and usually don’t have time to stop and give me a quote or answer biographical questions. As a result, the story I write is usually something along the lines of, “I started out feeling crabby/stressed/discombobulated, a nice person did a nice thing, it turned my day around, and I gave them an award.”

Therein lies the two important takeaways.

Keep your eyes open. Those beautiful tiny iridescent moments are floating around, waiting to be noticed.

Also, be aware that the small kindness you offer out in the world could make a surprisingly large impact.

See the BRIGHT SPOT. Be the BRIGHT SPOT.

* That being said, wouldn’t it be cool if I completed the 100 awards in 1,000 days? And what could be cooler yet? Day 1,000 falls on Halloween!