I work with a woman at my Safeway store named Diane. She's in her early fifties and has been at my store for about a year. Diane is a part-time cashier. Diane has a very bad case of epilepsy. She has about two or three grand mal seizures a week, which means that she looses conciousness and convulses on the floor for a few minutes before waking up and having no idea where she is. About once or twice a month, these seizures will happen while she's at work. At first, they were quite scary, in spite of most of us knowing about her situation - I recall one incident that resulted in an ambulance being called, and another which involved two of us eventually catching up with her wandering alone and completely incoherent in the produce department.

Diane has every reason in the world to be angry and bitter. She will never be free of countless drugs and medications designed to keep her brain working correctly. She will never be able to drive a car or operate heavy machinery. She will never be free of doctors' appointments, constant medical testing, and having to sleep twelve hours a night. She will always need to be wary of losing complete control of her life at any moment with no warning and of waking up unexpectedly with paramedics around her - something I would find particularly horrifying.

But she isn't, and never has been. Diane has truly been a ray of light for me in an otherwise stressful, adolescent and gossip-filled work environment. Diane never stops smiling and asking others how she can help and what she can do. She's always the first to let someone else take the spotlight and the last to worry about herself. She never stoops to the life-sucking levels of pettiness that are all too often encountered in a place like the cliquey front end of a grocery store. Even when, figuratively, she is brought to her knees by circumstances completely beyond her control - a seizure in public place, or a sudden bout of memory loss - she does whatever she can to put such things behind her and focus on other people. Diane accepts her fate and her lot in life with humility and grace. Really, there's no other word for it.

Diane and I hadn't seen each other in a while because of different schedules at work. Last week, we got into a discussion almost accidentally about values. I mentioned in passing to her how I often view making other people happy and comfortable as a real source of pleasure.

She smiled and said "I know. It's because you are loved. I think you reflect what's already in you."

How true of both myself - and her, I realized.