I have often written about how doing little acts of kindness daily improve your mood, help you nurture more gratitude, reduce your stress levels, makes you feel good inside and helps you spread love around. However, so far I haven’t been regular in doing that myself. I do try to be kind to people but my efforts are mostly focused on being kind to loved ones. For strangers, the kindness that I mostly show is to give some money to a beggar when I am out on the road and not more than that. I have helped out strangers with buying flour and other grocery items for their home but that is something I cannot do very often because I am too cash strapped often.
But if I cannot help people monetarily, that does not mean I cannot do acts of kindness daily. I can help people in many other ways and if I really want to spread kindness and love around, I need to do something nice for people other than those I know and love too. However, I understood this and believed in it at first and it was only recently that I adopted this attitude.
My younger sister is quite enthusiastic about spreading kindness around and she always has great ideas to help out people in any way she can. Sometime back she suggested we carry bottles with cool water in then and distribute them out to the beggars and other people on the street who cannot afford to have a cool drink. I don’t know why but I was a little skeptical of this idea at first and I was like it really wouldn’t be a big help to people and asked her to do it if she was interested in it. My reaction made her upset and it startled me as well. I am not the sort of person who refuses to help people so why did I react that way and that got me thinking. I realized I behaved that way because we don’t get to see more people helping out others and because the masses aren’t directly involved in it, I had somehow started to label certain acts of kindness as important or good enough and some as not-so-helpful.
Because people often demand money, I believed that they only way to help them out was through giving them money directly and other ways didn’t matter much. I didn’t like being judgmental especially when it comes to being kind to others so I slowly started to work on this limiting belief and began improving on it.
Yesterday, while I was having lunch with my son, someone rang the doorbell. My son gets really enthusiastic whenever he hears the doorbell because then he starts thinking of all the people that could be behind the gate and that thought cheers him up. Haha, I love how innocent and cute little kids are. So we went to open the gate and found a salesgirl selling bathroom cleaners at discounted rates. I had bought one for my bathrooms a day back so I told her I didn’t need it. She requested me to buy at least one but I refused her again. She became a little dismayed and decided to go away. At that very instant, something clicked me and I told her to wait. Faateh and I went inside and prepared a cool beverage for her quickly and went out with some money. I offered her a drink and bought one cleaner from her. She was so happy and her smile honestly made my day. She told me that she hadn’t made any sale since morning and was really upset about and I told her that I sensed that and bought one cleaner from her for the exact reason. She thanked me happily for the kind gesture. Both Faateh and I felt really good and he happily told his father that we helped aunty today.
The wonderful responses I got from that lady and my son in exchange for doing something small really improved my mood and encouraged me to be kind to people in any way I can. So from today onwards, I will be doing at least one little act of kindness daily to strangers and as many as I can for my loved ones and will be posting about it too. You are invited to do the same and attach the #littleactofkindness tag to your comment or post so we can all learn about the good things we do for the community and can learn of some great ideas to be kind to others. Also, this would bring many acts of kindness together and make Steemit and the world a kinder place to live in.
Love and light,
Sharoon.
For amazing stuff, head over to the @ecotrain where you will always find something inspirational.
