When kindness doesn’t count? July 9, 2009
Posted by Jane Matthews in acts of kindness.Tags: acts of kindness, help for heroes, justgiving, Kindness, mindfulness, phil packer, wildflowers
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I know I always seem to be writing about flowers but here's an act of kindness by The Parks Trust, who've planted the road verges with the most amazing display of wildflower colour
I’ve been a bit of a stranger to this blog since agreeing a date to hand the manuscript of my new book to the publisher. Nothing focuses the mind like a fast-approaching deadline. Perhaps I can argue that the fact that the book has lots of suggestions for acts of kindness means I haven’t entirely lost focus.
Still, I’m reminded of one of the things I’ve discussed in a few of the posts, about how, perversely, it’s often easier to spend a few quid on justgiving.com, than to spend time. Are we less kind these days partly because we’re all too busy rushing around, over-committed and over-stressed?
Or is it simply that we don’t notice the kindnesses – any more than we notice the way our food tastes, the smell of jasmine in the hedgerows or that someone we care about needs us to stop still for a minute and just hear them or hold them?
my weekly kindness audit
I have been kind this week, sending supportive emails to friends, going to view a house I thought my mum might be interested in, running teenagers to more parties than I’ve got friends, loaning my car out for two days, getting up at 5.30am to feed the cats so their scratching won’t wake the post-party teenagers, driving 90 minutes to watch a friend’s first outing as an actor (wonderful!), reading board papers so I can make a useful contribution to the charity where I volunteer, listening to my lonely uncle on the phone for an hour because he has no-one else, recycling newspapers, baking butterfly cakes (because one day I want the children to remember coming home to the smell), tweeting the important, the useful and the frivolous to my network on Twitter, and talking to shop assistants and tradesmen.
The things is, I just did that stuff as part of a week in the life. Nothing conscious or deliberate about it, and therefore nothing in it that has shifted, expanded or even noticeably fulfilled me in any way. No change in other words.
That doesn’t mean that those things don’t matter.
But it does rather show that any time we operate on automatic pilot we’re short-changing ourselves.
What does your average weekly niceness list look like? And how many of those things are you doing to be kind – as opposed to: feeling you should/feeling guilty/because you always have done them/because it would be harder to say no – which may be we end up doing them on automatic. Just a thought.
links
This story on justgiving is a good illustration of what I’m on about, how fundraiser Phil Packer has also benefitted from raising £1million for Help for Heroes http://blog.justgiving.com/2009/05/27/inspiration-for-fundraisers/phil-packer-hits-his-1-million-target/
And here’s those wildflower bandits, The Parks Trust in Milton Keynes http://www.theparkstrust.com/parks-trust/
The blind leaving the blind June 1, 2009
Posted by Jane Matthews in acts of kindness.Tags: mindful, mindfulness
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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/incognito_rico/165238469/
It’s only just beginning to dawn on me how many hundreds of opportunities there are in a single day to be a nicer person. I don’t mean the grand gestures, but the ordinary things that mark us out as human rather than automatons. Saying good morning to the sour-looking salesgirl when I buy my paper; asking a colleague how the weekend went and – the tough bit – actually listening to the answer; saying hi to a neighbour rather than pretending I haven’t spotted him in case he wants to stop and chat.
It’s a question of seeing the opportunities…ironically..since the first moment of this particular day involved a blind man.
Blind spot
I was racing along to an early morning meeting, headlights on and wipers wailing at the effort of trying to keep up with the rain. When I spotted a middle aged man with a white stick, standing at the bus stop in the deluge.
I spotted him – and I drove on. Even though it felt like life was shouting at me; something along the lines of “you say you’re going to be nicer, so here, I’ve gift-wrapped this one: blind man, rainy day, empty seat in your car…”.
I could pretend the reason I drove by was because a long, long time ago, I belonged to Bletchley Sea Rangers (unlikely, I know, given that this part of the world is about as far from the ocean as it’s possible to be). Like the rest of the scouts and guides movement we were all signed up to doing a good deed every day, but, and believe me this was drilled into us, don’t go offering help unless you’re absolutely certain the little old lady wants escorting to the other side of the road.
For all I knew the blind man might be enjoying the smell of rain on pavements and looking forward to meeting his friends on the bus.
Running on automatic
Hmm. Obviously the reason I didn’t stop was that I live the majority of my life on automatic, and my brain, body and the hands gripping the wheel were already pre-programmed to a) leave the house at 8.20 b) take 10 minutes to drive to the coffee shop c) arrive to meet ex-colleagues at 8.30am precisely.
How many of those 16 or so waking hours do we all spend like that, constantly focused on the next thing? And as the momentum of the day builds, what does it take to slow down, much less divert, to notice the way the rain’s turned the surface of the canal into a bubbling cauldron – or to offer a lift to a soggy man with a white stick?
I wasn’t being actively unkind. Just choosing to remain on automatic rather than human mode.
The regret kicked in immediately, especially as I started to recall all the times in my life people have gone out of their way for me.
Literally.
Rescue in the mountains
Twenty five years ago I was skiing with friends on top of a mountain in Austria when the weather turned. It was dusk, we were on the wrong side of the mountain, and, as the wind whistled itself into a fury, the ski lift gave a last, ominous gasp, and ground to a halt.
There was no prospect of trying to climb back to the top in the gloom. Our only choice was to ski down into the next valley and take our chances on finding some means of getting back to our hotel.
An hour later we knocked on the door of a farmhouse at the foot of the mountain, explained our predicament and asked for directions to a bus or rail station. The grizzled couple who answered told us there were no services between the valleys at this time of year and ushered us into their parlour to wait until they’d eaten their supper and could drive us back to the hotel.
Let’s be clear, this wasn’t a short hop to the nearest town. The human race may have managed to get people onto the moon but unless you’re Julie Andrews the only way across the mountains is by driving along the length of one valley and then back along the next. Three hours each way in blizzard conditions. The equivalent of driving a group of strangers from London to Manchester, and then back home.
Now that’s going out of your wayto help.
Living mindfully
Stopping to offer the blind man a lift might have taken me out of my way but it would also have jolted me out of my slavish addiction to the To Do list. And who knows, once I’d slipped out of automatic, what other opportunities the day might have opened up? Coincidentally, I found a great exercise on mindfulness on which, for most of us I guess, reveals the extent to we ‘don’t mind’ for much of the time. And this blog from Kristine Lowe which beautifully expresses how being too focused on where we’re going runs the risk of missing the important stuff.
I must be the only one who was hoping for rain at the weekend so I might have a second chance at going out of my way. Taxi anyone?
Have you ever gone out of your way for anyone? Or had someone go out of their way for you? Love to know…
