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Random Acts of Kindness Update

Okay, so if you read my blog post on Monday you saw that I committed to doing two random acts of kindness in two days and then reporting back here today on my experiences.

After that blog post, I started looking for opportunities to do something kind everywhere I went. So I suppose that means I was looking at people like I wanted to do something to them. I did. I wanted to do something kind. But regardless of that detail, I think it translated to me looking like a criminal choosing her mark. Several times, as I planned to pay for coffee or give up my good coffee shop booth to someone in need, people were genuinely creeped out by me and I had to awkwardly abort the mission.

I learned that you must act quickly with your random acts of kindness to avoid spooking people.

So, while I had planned on doing my first act of kindess at the coffeeshop, that was a failure and I may even need to wait a week or so before I return to that coffeeshop.

But later that day at the beach, a little boy and his mother were combing the water's edge a few hundred feet behind me. I could overhear their conversation: they were on vacation. This was his first time seeing the ocean. They had to leave soon. And he really, really wanted to find a seashell.

It wasn't a good seashell day. The beach was pretty much empty of shells. But I had one prize seashell in my pocket that I had picked up about ten minutes earlier. It was a really good one.  I pretended to lean down to inspect a piece of seaweed, left the shell in plain view, then kept walking.

Twenty steps later, I heard the happiest little boy noise I have ever heard in my life.

For my second random act of kindness, I turned to the internet. Some might say that was cheating, but to that I would reply: there is no place more randomly cruel than the internet, so random kindness is needed online more than anywhere else.

I decided that my act of kindness would be to support an unestablished blogger who had a Paypal donation button on their site.

I entered a combination of words into Google that I thought a nice new blogger might have on their site, along with some phrases about accepting donations.

The first result I found was indeed a blog with a donation button on it. However it was written in a language I can't read,  and featured several videos of topless people riding in a bus speaking what I think was Austrian. (No I'm not going to share the exact combination of words I searched to find that site.)  But I wasn't sure exactly what my donations would be supporting and whether I wanted to share my email address there.

Eventually, using a different combination of words, I found a different small blog accepting donations. This one was in Puerto Rico and was commited to blogging about improving animal welfare there. I donated.

It was less about monetary donation than the encouragement of giving a blogger the feeling that someone out there is rooting for you. I know that feeling well, because I depended on it to get me through lots of hard times when I was first getting started as a freelancer.

Did anyone try this experiment with me? How did it turn out for you?

my blog post on Monday you saw that I committed to doing two random acts of kindness in two days and then reporting back here today on my experiences.

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