Practice random kindness
and senseless acts of beauty
With our
news media constantly reporting random cruelties and senseless acts of
violence, it is a relief to turn to the following article spotted on an
American computer network. It originated in Glamour magazine (USA) and was
monitored for the Institute by Chris Welch.
It's a crisp winter day in
San Francisco. A woman in a red Honda, Christmas presents piled in the
back, drives up to the Bay Bridge tollbooth. 'I'm paying for myself, and
for the six cars behind me,' she says with a smile, handing over seven
commuter tickets.
One after another, the next
six drivers arrive at the tollbooth, dollars in hand, only to be told,
'Some lady up ahead already paid your fare. Have a nice day.'
The woman in the Honda, it
turned out, had read something on an index card taped to a friend's
refrigerator: 'Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.' The
phrase seemed to leap out at her, and she copied it down.
Judy Foreman spotted the
same phrase spray-painted on a warehouse wall a hundred miles from her
home. When it stayed on her mind for days, she gave up and drove all the
way back to copy it down. 'I thought it was incredibly beautiful,' she
said, explaining why she's taken to writing it at the bottom of all her
letters, 'like a message from above.'
Her husband Frank liked the
phrase so much that he put it up on the wall for his seventh graders, one
of whom was the daughter of a local columnist. The columnist put it in the
paper, admitting that though she liked it, she didn't know where it came
from or what it really meant.
Two days later, she heard
from Anne Herbert. Tall, blonde and forty, Herbert lives in Marin, one of
the country's ten richest counties, where she house-sits, takes odd jobs
and gets by. It was in a Sausalito restaurant that Herbert jotted the
phrase down on a paper place mat, after turning it around in her mind for
days.
'That's wonderful!' a man
sitting nearby said, and copied it down carefully on his own place mat.
'Here's the idea,' Herbert
says. 'Anything you think there should be more of, do it randomly.'
Her own fantasies include:
breaking into depressing-looking schools to paint the classrooms; leaving
hot meals on kitchen tables in the poor parts of town; slipping money into
a proud old woman's purse.
'Kindness can build on
itself as much violence can.'
Says Herbert, 'kindness can
build on itself as much violence can.'
Now the phrase is spreading,
on bumper stickers, on walls, at the bottom of letters and business cards.
And as it spreads, so does a vision of guerrilla goodness.
'The phrase is spreading, on
bumper stickers, on walls, at the bottom of letters and business cards.
And as it spreads, so does a vision of guerrilla goodness
In Portland, Oregon, a man
might plunk a coin into a stranger's meter just in time. In Patterson, New
Jersey, a dozen people with pails and mops and tulip bulbs might descend
on a rundown house and clean it from top to bottom while the frail elderly
owners look on, dazed and smiling. In Chicago, a teenage boy may be
shoveling off the driveway when the impulse strikes. What the hell,
nobody's looking, he thinks, and shovels the neighbor's driveway too.
It's positive anarchy,
disorder, a sweet disturbance. A woman in Boston writes 'Merry Christmas!'
to the tellers on the back of her checks. A man in St Louis, whose car has
just been rear-ended by a young woman, waves her away, saying, 'It's a
scratch. Don't worry.'
Senseless acts of beauty
spread: a man plants daffodils along the roadway, his shirt billowing in
the breeze from passing cars. In Seattle, a man appoints himself a one man
vigilante sanitation service and roams the concrete hills collecting
litter in a supermarket cart. In Atlanta, a man scrubs graffiti from a
green park bench.
They say you can't smile
without cheering yourself up a little - likewise, you can't commit a
random act of kindness without feeling as if your own troubles have been
lightened if only because the world has become a slightly better place.
'Like all revolutions,
guerrilla goodness begins slowly, with a single act'
And you can't be a recipient
without feeling a shock, a pleasant jolt. If you were one of those
rush-hour drivers who found your bridge fare paid, who knows what you
might have been inspired to do for someone else later? Wave someone on in
the intersection? Smile at a tired clerk? Or something larger, greater?
Like all revolutions, guerrilla goodness begins slowly, with a single act.
Let it be yours.
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