I am making stuttering progress in my efforts to be more kind. Sometimes it’s two steps forward and one step backward, other times it can feel like the opposite. But I do tend to notice them a bit more with other people. Random acts of kindness that usually require no effort at all, they can make the world a better place. It turns out many, if not most of us, carry out these acts more often then perhaps we realise.
I found this list of Random Acts of Kindness on the Mental Health Foundation website, a popular port-of-call for me these days, and while I found some that I could not realistically carry out – offering to babysit for a friend, dog-walking, offer to pick up some groceries for your elderly neighbour (my neighbours are mostly younger than me) – there are plenty I can do and actual do carry out. I do not to propose revealing which of these acts of kindness I already carry out, because you already know what a hero and martyr I am, at least in my own mind, and because I am sure you do them too. So, is this good for me, particularly with regard to my mental health?
In short, I have no idea. I volunteer at our local food bank, not in order to feel good about myself, but in order to put something back into society and I really enjoy what I do. We make a weekly charity donation to the same organisation but again it’s because we care about our fellow woman and man. We don’t sit there and congratulate each other and neither should we.
We take unwanted things to charity shops, not try to flog them through social media of whatever. If I find a piece of music I think someone will like, I’ll send them a link. And who wouldn’t return a lost item to its owner? That’s an illustration random acts of kindness and I’ll wager, as a non betting man, that you carry out all manner of acts of kindness because, I’d like to think, as someone who likes to read my blogs, you feel the same way about many aspects of life as I do.
I do not emerge from our food bank after a busy session, as we seem to have every week at the moment, and think, well my depression has lifted after that. I am not sure if I feel any kind of emotion at all. But after two years of volunteering, it’s basically what I do. It’s a vital part of my life and of who I am. Which means I enjoy it, a lot.
If I offer my seat on a bus to someone less mobile than me – and trust me, there are a few folk who are, despite appearances to the contrary – then I just do it. The random acts I carry out are simply because I want to do them. And I am glad I don’t feel special for doing what we all do.
Looking through the list, I realise that we are all kinder than we realise we are. And we hardly think about being kind because for most of us that’s in our nature.
As a human being, I am hugely flawed, like most of us in this world, but we can always do better. Being kind costs little or nothing. There’s no necessity to feel a glow of pride in what we do, but if we do, just breathe it all in and keep being kind.
So maybe I am not trying to be kind. More that I am trying to be kinder, on top of the natural kindness that lives within all of us. I don’t want or need anything back. Just being there for folk is enough. And who knows when and if I might be grateful for that random act of kindness?
