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PRACTICE
RANDOM KINDNESS
AND
SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY
It's a crisp winter day in San Francisco. A woman in a red Honda,
Christ- mas presents piled in the back, drives up to the Bay
Bridge tollbooth. "I'm paying for myself, and for the six cars
behind me," she says with a smile, handing over seven commuter
tickets.
One after another, the next six drivers arrive at the tollbooth,
dollars in hand, only to be told, "Some lady up ahead already paid
your fare. Have a nice day."
The woman in the Honda, it turned out, had read something on an
index card taped to a friend's refrigerator: "Practice random
kindness and senseless acts of beauty." The phrase seemed to leap
out at her, and she copied it down.
Judy Foreman spotted the same phrase spray-painted on a warehouse
wall a hundred miles from her home. When it stayed on her mind for
days, she gave up and drove all the way back to copy it down. "I
thought it was incredibly beautiful," she said explaning why she's
taken to writing it at the bottom of all her letters, "like a
message from above."
Her husband, Frank, liked the phrase so much that he put it up on
the wall for his seventh graders, one of whom was the daughter of
a local columnist. The columnist put it in the paper, admitting
that though she liked it, she didn't know where it came from [sic]
or what it really meant.
Two days later, she heard from Anne Herbert. Tall, blonde, and
forty, Herbert lives in Marin, one of the country's ten richest
counties, where she house-sits, takes odd-jobs, and gets by. It
was in a Sausalito restaurant that Herbert jotted the phrase down
on a paper place mat, after turning it around in her mind for
days.
"That's wonderful!" a man sitting nearby said, and copied it down
carefully on his own placemat.
"Here's the idea," Herbert says. "anything you think there should
be more of, do it randomly."
Her own fantasies include: (1) breaking into depressing-looking
schools to paint the classrooms, (2) leaving hot meals on kitchen
tables in the poor parts of town, (3) slipping money into a proud
old woman's purse. Says Herbert, "kindness can build on itself as
much as violence can." Now the phrase is spreading, on bumper
stickers, on walls, at the bottom of letters and business cards.
And as it spreads, so does a vision of guerrilla goodness.
In Portland, Oregon, a man might plunk a coin into a stranger's
meter just in time. In Patterson, New Jersey, a dozen people with
pails and mops and tulip bulbs might descend on a run-down house
and clean it from top to bottom while the frail elderly owners
look on, dazed and smiling. In Chicago, a teenage boy may be
shoveling off the driveway when the impulse strikes. What the
hell, nobody's looking, he thinks, and shovels the neighbor's
driveway, too.
It's positive anarchy, disorder, a sweet disturbance. A woman in
Boston writes "Merry Christmas!" to the tellers on the back of her
checks. A man in St. Louis, whose car has just been rear-ended by
a young woman, waves her away, saying, "It's a scratch. Don't
Worry."
Senseless acts of beauty spread: A man plants daffodils along the
roadway, his shirt billowing in the breeze from passing cars. In
Seattle, a man appoints himself a one man vigilante sanitation
service and roams the concrete hills collecting litter in a
supermarket cart. In Atlanta, a man scrubs graffiti from a green
park bench.
They say you can't smile without cheering yourself up a little --
likewise, you can't commit a random act of kindeness without
feeling as if your own troubles have been lightened if only
because the world has become a slightly better place.
And you can't be a recipient without feeling a shock, a pleasant
jolt. If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found your
bridge fare paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to
do for someone else later? Wave someone on in the intersection?
Smile at a tired clerk? Or something larger, greater? Like all
revolutions, guerrilla goodness begins slowly, with a single act.
Let it be yours.
Reprinted from Glamour magazine, December, 1991.