Unfortunately, most of us know about “random acts of violence,” those sudden and unplanned attacks that people are sometimes victims of. But how about “random acts of kindness”?
It may have started one day when the American writer Anne Herbert was sitting in a restaurant and scribbled this sentence on a napkin: “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” Later she repeated the idea in an interview with Glamour magazine, and the phrase “random acts of kindness” captured people’s imaginations.
There’s nothing really new about this, but the phrase made people think more about how small “kind” actions could make our daily lives better. You’ll find it easy to perform a “random act of kindness.” There’s no need to go to great lengths planning it. You simply seize the opportunity to do something good for another person and do is spontaneously.
There’s nothing half-hearted about this example of an act of kindness. One rainy night a woman was standing at a bus stop waiting or the bus, obviously struggling to stay dry. A man came by on a motorcycle and offered to give her a ride. Of course, the woman said no. It would be crazy to accept a ride from a stranger on a motorcycle! Suddenly the man reached out and put a 50-dollar bill in her hand. He said, “Please take a taxi. It hurts me to see you standing here in the rain like this.” Before she could refuse, he sped off on his motorcycle!
Kind acts can be contagious. Once, a woman was going through the toll station on a highway. Instead of paying for one ticker, she asked for two. She said to the toll collector, “The second ticket is for the car behind me.” She didn’t know the person in that car. She just did it on an impulse. So when the next car came up, the toll collector said to the driver, “You don’t have to pay. The woman in the blue car just paid for you.” The driver was so surprised that he decided to pay for the person behind him. Legend has it that this continued with 14 drivers.
So just imagine what the world would be like if we all practiced random acts of kindness from time to time. We’d not only give, but get lot out of it as well.