Back in September 2010, I was surprised one morning by what turned up on my computer: a generous review of Hand Wash Cold on the Tiny Buddha website.
You may know how relatively unschooled I am at social media, and if not totally unschooled, at least unconvinced. Still, I knew that hitting the Tiny was hitting the Big, at least on the computer.
I wondered how someone with so much media muscle — more than 235,000 Twitter followers, 70,000 Facebook fans, and 12 million web page views — could do something so selflessly kind?
The answer is, by being tiny.
I hope I can be twice as small in returning the favor.
Tiny Buddha founder Lori Deschene has a new book out, Tiny Buddha: Simple Wisdom for Life’s Hard Questions. I’m offering my pristine review copy right here as a giveaway, and you’ll want to do yourself a favor by commenting to enter by this Friday. (If you win, I promise the book will arrive to you by Christmas.) It’s a great gift for yourself or a friend, full of good old fashioned common sense and new-fangled how-tos. It captures some things you might have seen whiz past you on the web, and some things you’ll want to reflect on for more than a blink of time.
Lori is a smart and fluid writer (no wonder she has made a career as a web copywriter) and she weaves in crowdsourced contributions from her Twitter followers (like me) on such hefty topics as pain, change, love, money, fate, happiness and control. But the gem here is something that can never be quoted in 140 characters: the true story of Lori’s transformation from a recluse to a community builder, from a self-loathing misfit to an inspiring changemaker. This is a story we all share in one small way or another — it is the story of the Buddha’s leap over the wall of delusive, egocentric thought. This is the journey we all make, little by little, without a map, toward our complete potential. Taking that leap is the only way we can ever do good.
For starters, the book has shown me how to do something great today: return a tiny favor.
This one’s for you.
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Leave a comment on this post by the end of the day this Friday, Dec. 16 to enter the giveaway. Favor yourself with an extra entry by posting this tweet:
RT@kmaezenmiller Giving away @tinybuddha book here: http://bit.ly/szQIre
The winner of this giveaway has been notified. Thank you for participating.
When I first heard that Lori Deschene of the hugely popular inspirational site 
