A woman in a car pulled up to the toll booth at the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. “I'm paying for myself and the six cars behind me.” she says with a smile.
One after another, the next six drivers arrive at the booth, money in hand. “Some lady up ahead already paid your fare,” says the collector. “Have a nice day.”
The woman, it turned out, had read a note taped to a friend's refrigerator: “Practice Random Kindness.”
The message from the door of that refrigerator is spreading, on bumper stickers, walls and business cards. And as it spreads, so does a vision of guerrilla-goodness.
A passer-by may plunk a coin into a stranger's meter just in time. A group of people with pails and mops may descend on a run-down house and clean it from top to bottom while the elderly owners look on, amazed. A teenager shoveling snow may be hit by the impulse and shovel his neighbor's driveway too.
Senseless acts of beauty spread. A man plants daffodils along a roadway. A concerned citizen roams the streets collecting litter in a supermarket cart. A student scrubs graffiti from a park bench. It's a positive anarchy, a gentle disorder, a sweet disturbance.
They say you can't smile without cheering yourself up. Likewise, you can't commit a random act of kindness or beauty without feeling as if your own troubles have been lightened – because the world has become a slightly better place.
And you can't be a recipient without feeling a pleasant jolt. If you were one of those commuters whose toll was paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to do for someone else?
There are times in our lives when we look around us and are disheartened by what we see. Sometimes we might feel as though we are powerless to make an impact on the situation, but as Mother Theresa once said “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”
Like all revolutions, guerrilla-goodness begins slowly, with a single act. The question is, what are you going to do today?
Get involved!
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