Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty (fwd)
Tiny Dancer
what this group *should* and most of the time *is* about. Enjoy and
may it spur you on to perform your own acts of "guerrilla goodness"!
Practice Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty
Reprinted from Glamour magazine, December, 1991.
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 [sic] 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 placemat.
"Here's the idea," Herbert says. "anything you think there should be more
of, do it randomly."
Her own fantasies include: (1) breaking into depressing-looking schools
to paint the classrooms, (2) leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in the
poor parts of town, (3) slipping money into a proud old woman's purse.
Says Herbert, "kindness can build on itself as much as 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.
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 run-down 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.
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.
Cheers,
TD
So Merry Christmas one and all
There's no place I'd rather be
from Elton John's "Step Into Christmas"
For a good time call
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LizzieZ
>in time.
But then he might get arrested like that nice woman in Ohio did 4 years ago for
doing the same thing! If you don't remember the story, here's an update:
http://www.wcinet.com/th/News/020898/National/94647.htm
Otherwise, I love this article! I've seen it many times before, and I still
enjoy it and try to apply it to my life whenever possible. Thanks for sharing
it Rhonda!!
Liz
RetroTrish
this!
Trish in Atlanta
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Tiny Dancer
>>In Portland, Oregon, a man might plunk a coin into a stranger's meter just
>>in time.
>
>But then he might get arrested like that nice woman in Ohio did 4 years ago for
>doing the same thing! If you don't remember the story, here's an update:
>http://www.wcinet.com/th/News/020898/National/94647.htm
Must we bring reality into this, Liz? Let's just forget that ever happened! :-)
I do remember this one (after checking the article) and it's a bit tricky. If
she had simply put the coins in *before* the cop showed up then she'd
be free and clear but I can see where a hard-ass copper would want to
charge her as she was interferring in police business. So, the lesson here
is to practice random kindness *quietly* and away from the cops!
>Otherwise, I love this article! I've seen it many times before, and I still
>enjoy it and try to apply it to my life whenever possible. Thanks for sharing
>it Rhonda!!
You're welcome, Liz! Words of wisdom I try to follow but it was extra hard
today, what a madhouse out there! They were literally directing traffic at
the grocery store and I don't mean cars, they were directing the carts at
the checkout. Took me more than an hour to buy 5 freakin' items, sheesh!
But it was very quiet at the restaurant I play NTN Trivia (Carlos Murphy's)
where we went for dinner so it all evened out, I guess :-)
Cheers,
TD
I bought my brother some gift wrap for Christmas.
I took it to the Gift Wrap department and told them to wrap it,
but in a different print so he would know when to stop unwrapping.
Steven Wright
Webmistress of the official a.c.u '70s site