Well yesterday was a pretty amusing day. It was Pay it Forward Day, the idea being that on April 29, 2010 everyone who wanted to be a part of the day as a group made a conscious organized effort apart from our normal daily routines. The message was to “~ Be the Change in the World~ start in your own Community… 1 Kind Act 4 the Planet, an Animal or Human Counts! Love+ Altruism + Action= Change”.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?tab=3#!/event.php?eid=106599329364917&ref=ts

The Goal was to get a minimum of 10,000 registrations for Pay It Forward Day Event on April 29, 2010, where each of them made a conscious effort to make a difference in someone else’s life. The group as of today has 259, 952 confirmed guests (I’m quite surprised and amused by the palindromic nature of this number…not sure why it matters, it just seems like a weird coincidence) – if only 10% of them actually took action of the day that would still be nearly 26,000 random acts of kindness…which has got to be a good thing.

I love this idea as a concept…in fact I wish that people did this every day and didn’t have to be reminded by having a special day for it…but hey, in this busy and fast paced life that we all exist in at the moment I’m a realist. Generally other people and doing things for them is not a high priority for people running around going about their daily business (though it’s not really an excuse and life would be so much better if we did all spare a thought for other people more often).

So I did my bit for Pay it Forward day and performed my random act of kindness in my local supermarket by offering to pay for the items that the lady behind me in the queue was purchasing. The reaction I got was nothing less that pure astonishment. She asked me to explain what pay it forward was about so I explained to her that you do a kind deed for someone else and if possible you ask them to pay it forward in doing something nice for someone else and so on and so forth. She asked me if it needed to all be in the same day and I told her that no, it could be whenever she wanted. So I paid for her items, handed her the bag, thanked her for allowing me to pay for the items and wished her a nice day. She was very appreciative for the gesture, but still somewhat bemused, as I walked off she simply said “extraordinary”…which both made me very happy but also a little sad.

I was glad to have surprised someone and to have done something nice for them and it left me with a spring in my step and a smile on my face for the rest of the day. But in a way it was sad that a random act of kindness was met with such disbelief. So I’m making this a call out to each of you, to try and remember to do random kind acts for strangers on a regular basis, so that people aren’t so dumbfounded when people do something kind for them. It can be anything, letting someone pull out in front of you at a junction, paying for the person’s coffee who is in front of you at Starbucks, giving someone a ticket for a car park that still has time on it, even something as small as holding the door for someone or smiling to them as they pass you on the street. It doesn’t have to be big, and it doesn’t have to cost money, but wouldn’t it be great if we all did things like this more often…?

C x