“In February 2014 my husband and I loaded our three kids, pet dog and pet squirrel into our SUV and began a heart-shaped trip across The United States of America. The goal was to travel through 20 states in 20 days and commit 1,000 acts of kindness. This is our story.”
That is the tagline to an ebook I wrote in 2015 called, “A Kind Heart in America: My Family’s Heart-Shaped Journey of 1,000 Acts of Kindness Across America.
It was a REALLY big deal to me, to write that book. And at the time of writing it, I thought I had so many answers in life. But as life likes to show us, we don’t ever have the answers we think we have.
Shortly after I finally put the book together, my youngest son passed away and I never put the work into marketing or promoting the book that I “should have.” It was the kind of devastation that turns your life upside down, and to be honest, I kind of forgot about the book, other than the occasional conversation with my kids about the big trip, or a Facebook memory reminding me.
Life just changed so dramatically, and my viewpoints on the world did too.
I never once gave up on kindness though, it just had a new face of inspiration.
When I made the trip, I had no idea Elijah would even happen. We had not planned on having any more children. Nor did I ever imagine that I would become a mother who would see one of her children die.
But, Elijah made it into the book, because I waited until after he was born to write it. And I am so happy that I waited, and got to mention him as part of our family.
Because he had such a short life, all he ever knew was happiness and love, so we have made his legacy one of kindness and making others happy.
We started the hashtag #loveelijah to share his story, and acts of kindness done in his memory.
I don’t post as much as I did for the first four years. But we still do daily acts of kindness in his name. Life, as I mentioned it before, has a way of getting in the way of the dreams we make for ourselves. But even without the hashtag, the work is still being done.
And I will keep my promise to change the world in his name… even if it is through small acts of kindness. Because I believe every act of love, no matter how small, has the potential to change the world.
None of that information on the card is correct anymore… but it was a big idea for the trip, so I’m sharing…
As I mentioned earlier, life has a way of surprising us, and the other day I was making a list of books that I have written for my publisher and they wanted to know how many copies I had sold of each book. I knew I had not sold a lot of copies of this book, but I had no idea how stunned I would be when I saw I had ONLY sold 14 copies of the book I traveled 20 states in 18 days to write.
It just seemed like such a hard blow. I put a lot of effort into writing this thing.
And then I thought about it, and it was a lot of bad timing. I was still pretty young and naive when I wrote the book. And there are probably a million other reasons it didn’t work out… but I’m still so proud of myself for taking such an epic journey.
So I’m going to repost the blog posts here for the next month or so.. and if you feel so intrigued, you can still buy the book. If not, you can just enjoy the free blog posts!
Either way, I am kind of excited to relive this trip and share it with a “new” audience! Especially since my ability to travel across the country is kind of limited right now. A virtual trip is better than no trip!
So let’s go! We’ll start tomorrow. So get a good night’s rest!
Sweet dreams everyone. Thanks for reading!
Kelly Airhart
