This Friday is World Kindness Day, a day of coordinated acts of kindness, of gifts from the heart that we can offer each other and that have the power to transform the world.
Last month at my church we were invited to be thoughtful of ways that we could offer simple moments of grace to a stranger. Some people bought a meal for someone or paid for someone’s coffee order. My simple act was pressing the “open” button on the subway turnstile so that someone with a bike could easily exit. This small gesture cost me nothing and yet offered a moment of ease and an opportunity to move more gracefully though life.
Generosity is Global
I like that this is World Kindness Day. It’s not rich people giving to poor people day. It’s an everywhere, everyone acting kindly towards another, or towards themselves. I was moved last week by this story video about Generosity and the Gift Economy. What stood out to me was Nipun Mehta’s awareness that generosity is the answer to the universal problem of inequality. And generosity is present in communities all around the world. (You can watch the full 20-minute here.)
Mbwenu with milk from his cow for us to take home and enjoy. We encountered generocity wherever we went! (Manyamula, Malawi; July 2015)
Sharing the Gift
Mehta told a story of meeting a poor woman in Japan who experienced a real low point four years before. Her health, relationship, and finances were all presenting challenges. In the video he relays her healing process when she was ready to make a change: “then I remembered that when you feel like you don’t have anything is when you start to really deteriorate your spirit and so she said, what do I have? What are the gifts that I can offer the world; when it seems like I have nothing; when the conditioned mind is saying I am bankrupt? She decided that every day she’d make a rice ball and give it to one stranger. She did it every single day for 4 years.”
Then things began to turn around for her. She experiences a lot of happiness now, she owns a successful restaurant. And she credits the practice of giving the one rice ball as the source of her strength.
That joy in giving is something I know as a donor, and it is something that our Small Business Fund groups know as they Share the Gift with someone else in their community. Their acts of kindness might perfectly reflect this woman’s practice of sharing a rice ball, though in Malawi it might be sharing a donut or tomato.
SIA Small Busienss Fund leaders in Malawi practiced Sharing the Gift by teaching other women how to bake and market donuts and breads.
Go Out and Experiment!
On this World Kindness Day I encourage you to Share the Gift and to give because you have been given to. Mehta concluded his statement in the video with this advice: “Go out and have some part of your life which is no strings attached and just notice how that makes you feel, and just notice the ripple effect of what happens there.
“We tend to think that if you give freely, that I’ll be taken advantage of, that it’s not going to work out. But you might surprise yourself. And what comes out between the two of you – which was previously transactional and now just is trust-based – that possibility is going to be a whole new paradigm.”
Bonus Track! “Kind and Generous” by Natalie Merchant
