Daisy's Hand
Don't wait to feel joy and then act. Act faithfully, and joy grows up around you. — Steve Martin – Vision-Keeper, Dream Coach, and Grandfather
Daisy’s Hand
Daisy is four, and a girl, and will correct you if you forget either fact.
We were crossing a parking lot last week, and without thinking, without ceremony, she put her hand up into mine. And her whole hand vanished. Disappeared. Swallowed up inside my one big working hand like it was never there.
And I thought: this. This is what joy looks like.
Not the face—though her face was doing something wonderful. The hands. The small one inside the large one. The trust of it. The keeping and the being kept.
I have spent twenty-five years helping people build houses of joy—plans and protections and trees they’ll never sit under. And here was the whole curriculum in one small grip, crossing a parking lot.
She doesn’t know what I do. She doesn’t know about plans or legacies or 200-year thinking. She only knows that when she puts her hand up, a big hand closes around it, and the cars stop, and she is safe.
That is the entire promise. That is what all the building is for. So that the small hand can go up and find the large one waiting. So that the light is on. So that the tree, someday, throws its shade.
We got to the other side. She let go and ran off toward something more interesting. And I stood there in the parking lot, a sixty-something man with wet eyes, having just been handed the meaning of my whole working life by a four-year-old who’d already forgotten it happened.
That’s joy. It lives in the hands. Keep them ready. The small one is coming.
My grandpa always said
“Don’t wait until you feel like doing good. Do it first. The feeling shows up afterward, every single time, like clockwork.”
One Simple Action You Can Take Right Now
Leave a light on—literally, tonight. A porch light, a lamp in the window. Not for anyone in particular. Just so anyone out in the dark has one warm square to round the bend toward. Make it a habit. It rewires how you think about warmth: as something you give, not something you wait to feel.
Observations from My Advisory Board
Dolly Parton would smile and talk about her Imagination Library—books planted like trees for kids she’ll never meet—and say that’s exactly it, honey, you give it away and somehow you get to keep it.