How to bring magic to strangers.
{Photo: Garcia Girls}
By The Garcia Girls.
We are two sisters who were on a mission in 2013: to bring magic to strangers.
Each week we exchanged kindness missions, completed them in our respective cities, and blogged our experiences at Garcia Girls Magic.
Some of the missions have included: Leave something lovely on a stranger’s doorstep, post a treasure map to one of your favorite spots, tell a joke to a stranger, make your own mixed CD and leave it for someone in a record store, give out free high fives, and go the arrivals area of your airport and welcome people to your city.
{Photo: Garcia Girls}
For our last mission, we interviewed each other about the project in hopes of inspiring others to spread the magic in 2014. The last question we asked each other was:
How did Garcia Girls Magic (GGM) change your life?
These were our answers:
Michelle Garcia: Well, Stacey and I started GGM in a selfish attempt to make our lives better. We had a pretty rough 2012, and we just had to make 2013 a happy year. So, we created GGM — to have fun together, to bring us closer when we are so far apart, and to brighten a few strangers’ days along the way.
And do you know what? That whole thing about the more happiness you give away, the more you get… well, it works.
2013 was easily, hands-down, one of the happiest years of my life. I credit it all to a very special thing the Universe has to offer each and every one of us:
M-A-G-I-C.
Magic to make the ugly, beautiful.
Magic to make evil, good.
Magic to make broken hearts, whole.
Magic to turn loneliness into a family.
Magic to turn darkness into light.
I am talking about myself here, people. Practicing magic once a week has been transformative for me.
{Photo: Garcia Girls}
And do you know what the stupid catch is to happiness?… that I did not learn until I did GGM?… that is so simple you will smack yourself silly once you find out?
It turns out, all you have to do is:
B-E-L-I-E-V-E.
Just believe in magic.
Think that you deserve to make it and receive it.
What do you have to do lose anyway?
… which is the very question I asked myself a year ago, when Stacey and I finished our phone call that started this whole project.
Stacey Marie Garcia: I always tell people I am not religious, but I do believe in kindness and magic. I have always been a believer, I kept it in my heart as my compass, and occasionally, when I felt like it, I extended my kindness wand to others. But, believing it and practicing it are two different things.
Practicing it means exercising it, deliberately making it happen, creating it in your life and purposefully sharing it with others. GGM made kindness and magic a weekly practice for me, an active endeavor. It became an essential part of my weekly routine, a discipline. It completely changed my life.
And I cannot help but wonder, what if we all practiced kindness regularly? Wouldn’t this world be so much better?
When Michelle and I were little girls, we had grand visions of saving the world. I think most kids have that sort of superhero desire.
When we first learned about pollution, violence, injustice, starvation or wars, we always asked Mom and Dad: “Why do these awful things happen?” “Why isn’t anyone stopping it?” “Why aren’t we helping?”
Our parents were really good about teaching us to not stand idly, but to take action in making changes that we cared about in our own lives and the lives of others around us.
But as we all grow older, we start to fully realize how awful things can be, how horribly people treat each other and the overwhelming scope of if wears us all down. We lose hope and become more jaded, protective, isolated and pessimistic every time we read the newspaper.
So oftentimes, as grown-ups, we forget those basic instincts of empathy and kindness that we exercised so often as kids. We are so defeated and scarred that we start to believe we are helpless in bringing about any good. So we ignore someone who needs help, or choose to turn away and blame it all on how rotten the world is.
And the five-year-old inside all of us screams “Why?”
Michelle and I are not out to change the world anymore. The world has hardened us a bit. But we both strongly believe that there is hope in changing the small community you live in.
{Photo: Garcia Girls}
I think we learned, through GGM, that we can make small changes that are meaningful. That we are helping, in our own Garcia Girls way, to remind our communities that kindness is simple and easy, and magic is real and extraordinary.
Once you believe it, practice it, and if we all try, in our own ways, to bring kindness to strangers, then maybe we will make the world a bit more magical.
*****
Simply put, the Garcia Girls are the type of siblings that can’t live without each other. They spent their childhood riding stick horses, dancing around bonfires, and living and traveling out of an Astro Van every summer. But as adults, their mutual desire for adventure has flung them apart to different places in the United States, and even the world at times. Currently, Stacey is the Director of Community Engagement at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, California. Michelle is a 4-H Program Coordinator through the University of Minnesota Extension near St. Cloud, Minnesota. They love their jobs and they love what they do everyday. But it is a big sacrifice to live so far away from each other. And so although Garcia Girls Magic is an attempt to help others, ultimately it is to help them too… to feel a little closer… to feel like they can still play together, thousands of miles apart.
*****
Read more: Exercises of Love: 19 Peculiar Acts of Kindness.
{Love Assurance.}
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