Nov 19 2008
My First Post Concerning Random Acts of Kindness
Hello everyone! Today is my first day blogging for you on a subject that I find fascinating. Kindness in our world. Especially random acts of kindness. Without any fanfare or recognition there are many people today who are practicing random acts of kindness and I find their stories uplifting when you can actually track one of the stories down. Usually a person is noticed doing something kind for someone and the story is told secondhand. This fascination has led me to try every day to bestow an act of kindness on someone and I’ve found that when I do I usually get just as much out of the experience as the person I acted on. In my blogs I will let you in on ways that you can show kindness towards people in many different ways without it costing you very much in time or money. I will also bring you stories of wonderful things people have done for others that I have witnessed or heard about. Right now I have been up all night working on a project and it is 5:35 Eastern Time. I wish someone would walk up with a nice cup of coffee for me right about now but I won’t hold my breath.
For my first blog I’d like to tell you about a little act that you can do that will give you a sense of what I’m talking about. I was told many years ago to try this and see how I felt afterwards. Well I gave it a try and I have made an effort to occasionally do it since then. It’s not something you would do every day but even my kids know that sometimes if they are with me I resort to this behavior. Sometime in the future, soon, when you are driving through that fast food drive through and you come up to the pay window simply tell the teller you would like to pay for the person’s bill in the car behind you. Tell her/him that they can tell the unsuspecting participants behind you that a friend picked up their tab for them.
Now I can already hear some people saying that you may have just bought a millionaire a burger. I had that funny feeling the first time I tried it but then I thought so what? What if it was a millionaire back there or what if it was some person down to their last few dollars hoping to have enough to get a bite to eat. You see I have been in both situations before. Well off and down to my last dollar. If someone had done that for me in any of those cases I would have been thankful that someone cared enough to do it. Oh and after doing this for years I have never had it be over ten bucks. Trust me it will do more for you than you could ever imagine.
I guess this will be kind of a strange subject to blog about but I like to let my feelings be known whenever possible. I am a filmmaker but the time and subject matter you deal with from one film to another only lets you say so much that way. I decided that blogging would let me have a voice every day.
So today please look around and see if there is something you can do for someone just out of the blue that will make their day a little brighter. I promise you without a doubt that suddenly your day will become brighter too. Karma wouldn’t have it any other way.
Have a happy day! Mark
