The Lightning Talk on Kindess
July 24, 2025Tags:
We do internal trainings at work, and sometimes we do lightning talks. ⚡ These are 6-minute long talks on anything. They don’t have to have slides or even visuals. Today, my teammates did some awesome tech lightning talks!
I started the day excited about giving a lightning talk on .NET Aspire. I’ve been doing some really fun stuff with it and enjoy it! I also had an incident with AI that was going to inspire a mischievous lightning talk. 8:00am me was on board with this! 💪🏻
However, I ended up putting that on pause to give a lightning talk on the power of kindness in a world of despair. 🕯️
This wasn’t the talk I expected to give today - especially since I was preaching to the choir on it. I work with some of the kindest folks out there!
But I needed to give that talk today… for me.
I’ve been supporting some friends going through some very tough, heart-breaking times.💔
If there’s anything you should know about me, when tough news strikes, I’m the one friends and family go to for reassurance, love, support, and advice. I’m the one that will give the healing hugs if needed. Normally, I’m good at letting my logical, rational mind sort it all.
By 10:00am this morning, though, I felt like I had the life knocked out of me because I got hit with not 1 but 2 sets of bad news. My friend detained by ICE (mentioned this in my Week of Mondays post) got moved to a further location - which’ll make it even harder for family to visit. His wife got more devastating news as well. In another case, a friend has the world pouring a world of pain on her, one thing after another.
I was a ball of tears in my office. My older son was home, and he popped in the office and gave me a huge hug. (And yes, he gives healing hugs like I do. I’ve trained him well.)
The world has a lot of dark corners, dark alleys, and darkness. And I don’t like the dark. It was at that point where I knew I had to give this lightning talk. I had to find that glimmer of hope.
When I went to start the Zoom meeting, I ran into technical issues - and this was immediately after a reboot! 😩 One of my teammates came to the rescue and started the meeting while I rebooted… again. 🙄
When it came to my talk at the end, I think all the demo gremlins knew I was just done with them. So the talk went off without their interference.
I talked about the benefits of kindness plus acts of kindness that can be that little glimmer of hope. I encouraged others to be that glimmer of hope.
So today’s talk was what enabled me to dry some of my tears. It’s what helped me find enough peace to attempt to work through some tough Blazor problems. While the world is very heavy here, it was the message I needed in order to pick up my spirits, even just that little to move forward.