Life & Therapy

Recently, I have been thinking about the power of true kindness, and the profound impact it can have on us.  I’m talking about the real thing: kindness with no strings, no ego, no expectations, kindness for kindness’ sake, big kindnesses and seemingly small kindnesses, seemingly invisible kindnesses and blatantly visible ones.  I’ve been remembering all sorts of events where people have been kind to me and to others, and how those events inspired me and taught me to also be kind.

One of the first kindnesses that I remember happened when I was 5.  My family was flying to Germany, and it was my first time on an airplane.  We had a layover and you could get off the plane to stretch your legs, or you could stay on.  I chose to stay on while my family went to go stretch.  Then I changed my mind, but I guess it was too late, and they told me to return to my seat, where I sat feeling terrified that the plane would leave without my family and I’d have to fly to Germany by myself.  I spent all my energy privately trying not to cry.  While in this state of terror, a flight attendant came up to me and was kind enough to not try get me to talk about it; instead he asked with a twinkle in his eyes, “Would you like an ice cream with a cherry on top?”  I don’t know how he knew to do this sort of magic, but that question erased all of my fears, and transformed the entire flight from a fearful journey to an incredible adventure.  I think I probably would have been willing to fly to Germany by myself knowing that there was ice cream involved.  I still remember this moment and this person 45 years later, and I still feel grateful.

Kindness has such an impact because it breaks through all of our differences, defenses and stories and demonstrates on the giving end, that we see one another and that we care, and on the receiving end, that we are seen and we are cared for.  The more kindness is given, the more kindness there is to give. So, having said that, I’ll get to the main reason I’m writing about kindness to begin with.  I’m here to throw down a kindness challenge. I want us all to inspire each other with kindnesses that we’ve seen or done.  No cheating and looking online for lists of kindnesses!  Really try to think of times in your life where you’ve been the recipient of, the witness to, or the bearer of kindness. Then share them in the comments section.  I’ll demonstrate by sharing 50 of my own right here.  If you can think of 50 yourself, go for it.  Even one is enough.  If you want to take this further, commit 50 acts of kindness over a period of 50 days.  Why 50?  I’m turning 50 sometime this year and for my birthday, I want a kinder world.

Without further ado, here is my rambling list of 50 kindnesses, in no particular order, some simple and tangible, some more obscure:

1. As mentioned above, being offered ice cream when I was sad and scared, in a way that kept my dignity intact was a kindness I never forgot.
2. The simple act of making eye contact with people who feel invisible can be kind, whether they are on the fringes of society or nobody else takes them seriously.
3. Shortly after returning from the hospital with my first newborn, people brought us meals.  I remember eating one that was so simple, but so healthy and so needed, I could feel my depleted self being refueled on multiple levels.
4. When I was eighteen, I worked as a server in a restaurant where the abusive owners felt free to scream at us if we made mistakes, and everyone could hear it throughout the small restaurant.  After being screamed at for making a mistake once, I was desperately trying not to cry while bringing food out to the tables, and at one table, the patron looked at me and said, “That Tom (one of the owners) can be a real bear sometimes.  Don’t let him get to you.” It made such a difference to know that someone understood that it was not okay to be yelled at in that way.
5. Once, when I lived alone, I cut my finger badly and was so tired already, and so overwhelmed, I didn’t want to deal with it, and I most definitely did not want to see all the blood.  I stuck a towel on it and knocked on my friend’s door downstairs, and asked if he could deal with it for me.  No questions asked, he took me by the wrist, washed it, dressed it, and sent me on my way.
6. Years of kindness came from my friend and mentor, Mary, who I have written about extensively here.  I had other mentors, too, older people who took me seriously and guided me through my young adult life.  While we are on the topic of mentoring, let me say, mentoring anyone for any length of time is a really great kindness.
7. When I was in my twenties, I would visit my friends in Seattle who seemed like real grownups to me at a time when I still felt like a lost child.  They had real furniture! One day, after sitting at their kitchen table, with my big boots with big buckles tucked under me, I noticed I’d scratched the nice kitchen chair with the boots.  These were pretty big scratches and I was mortified and scared, and pointed it out to my friend in an attempt to come clean.  My friend blamed their dog.  Years later, we talked about it.  She’d thrown her dog under the bus for me because she could see how awful I felt.
8. When I worked at an art supply store, a woman with kids came in and told me how she was moving to Seattle and scared out of her mind about it.  I told her about how my friends lived up there and that they were raising a child and that they really loved it and that they found many kid-friendly things to do.  A few days later in my work cubby, I found an envelope with a handmade lapis necklace and a letter from this woman.  She’d left for Seattle and said that our conversation had made her feel so much better, she went straight home and made that necklace for me that day.  It fit me perfectly and I still have it, because it reminds me that kindness can happen anywhere between anyone.
9. I had a friend who I met when he was dying of cancer at age 35.  He had no money and no insurance and there were many ways in which he was treated poorly, and there were also many acts of kindness in the community.  Some friends of his threw him a giant yard sale and several local businesses donated expensive items like brand new bikes and computers. Many people showed up to help him, and he was able to live out the very short amount of days he had left without losing his home or the little bit of comfort he had left.
10. The same friend, once he knew he was going to die, decided he wanted to do as much art as he could until he couldn’t do it any more. He loved making art so much, but had always put off doing it.  One day, I introduced him to a friend who was also an artist and lived downstairs from me.  He dropped everything just so the two of them could talk about art.  My friend who was dying kept remembering that conversation because he’d never before connected with anyone else who felt the same way about art as he did. Sometimes kindness is as simple as making the time for a conversation.
11. I used to take some of my work breaks at a local cemetery.  One day, I was just sitting there, when a small child, maybe about 4 years old, came up to me and started peppering me with questions. They wanted to know about the “frankensteins” that were under the ground, meaning the buried, then asked me about all sorts of details.  It felt important that I stay and answer these questions, and I did as best I could.  Then the child asked “Why do young people die?”  I was going by intuition at this point, so I gave an answer that a 4 year old might understand, which apparently was acceptable.  The mom, who’d watched silently throughout our whole conversation, thanked me and told me that their young nanny had just been killed in a car accident and they were all still reeling from it and they hadn’t figured out how to have this conversation with their child yet.  Sometimes, you don’t know the depth of a kindness you are offering until after the fact, but you offer it on instinct, anyway.
12. There was a long-haired man in Eugene in the 90s who dressed like Jesus and walked around barefoot, everywhere.  If you were behind him in the grocery line, he’d tell the cashier he was buying your groceries, and would do so, and not take no for an answer.  I found this out because I was in line behind him, and at the time, I had very little money.
13. At toll booths, my sister used to always pay for whoever was behind her.  She probably still does.
14. I once read about someone who, once in a while, leaves a massive tip on top of the normal tip at a restaurant, then skedaddles before the server can see him.  This inspired me to do the same from time to time.
15. For a while, I was the youngest kid in the neighborhood I grew up in.  One day, I wasn’t being included in something all the kids were playing, and my friend’s dad took me into the kitchen and told me that he had this feeling I had a sweet tooth, and that we should eat some ice cream together.  He somehow managed to make me feel like I was doing him a favor by eating this ice cream with him, and he didn’t say anything about me being excluded at all, and I completely forgot about it.  The ice cream erased it so well, that to this day, I have no recollection about what in particular was upsetting.  All I can remember is the kindness.
16. I was a pretty chaotic and out of control person in my twenties.  One of the kindest things my friend and roommate did for me at the time was to tell me the truth about how my chaos was impacting her negatively.  She did not offer me a way out of that truth, and that changed my whole world, and helped me to grow up.  Sometimes, kindness is telling someone how to stop hurting you.
17. I had a young black cat that got attacked by a pit bull.  The whole experience was awful, from trying to find him in the place he’d hidden, then taking him to the vet as he bled all over me, then making the decision to euthanize him because of the depth of his injuries.  I went home and was alone and in a stupor.  There was a knock at my door, and my coworker who was a very tall and quiet man, handed me the softest, stuffed leopard that I had been eying for months at work.  My coworkers had pooled together to buy it and my manager had sent him to give it to me.  He said nothing, just gave it to me and left.  I curled up with that leopard and felt deeply comforted, and I still have it today.
18. When I was 22, just after graduating from college, I went on a bike trip across the US with my friend Andrew.  So many kindnesses came from strangers in every state we went through, and many strangers offered us water, food, advice, and places to stay.
19. One day in southeastern Kentucky, we’d biked up and down a ton of mountains all through the day.  It was brutal.  We were exhausted and had hit a wall emotionally and just wanted to get to a campsite.  A local woman in a big pickup truck pulled over and informed us that there were many more mountains between us and the campsite.  She said in her thick southern accent, “Throw your bikes in the truck and I’ll drive you there.” She dropped us off, handed me a twenty dollar bill and said, “Get yourself a nice meal when you get to the West Coast,” and drove off before we could say anything.
20. Our bike trip was in 1993, so we had no cell phones or any technology whatsoever.  We just had AAA maps, and we’d pick a route and go.  One day in Kansas, a man drove up to us and told us there was a tornado warning up ahead and to go no further.  We found a church and they let us stay in the basement.  We biked past the wreckage the following day, grateful for that man’s warning.
21. This bike trip was a wonderful, glorious adventure, but every once in a while, it also was really difficult and scary and overwhelming.  By the time we were in the Redwoods, we were both pretty burnt out.  One day, my friend went into the grocery and I stayed outside because I was having a lot of feelings that I didn’t want him or anyone to see.  So, there I was, sitting and hoping my sunglasses were hiding the fact that I was crying, and waiting for the feelings to pass, when this woman gently asks me where we’d biked from.  In a shaky voice that betrayed my emotions, I answered.  She, like the flight attendant, didn’t try get me to talk about it.  She instead invited us to her family’s house for pizza and offered us a place to stay for the night.  We took her up on that, and all of us had a really good time together.  They sent us off the next day with snacks and good wishes.
22. I’ve learned from so many experiences now, that feeding people is a great act of kindness.  Feed people when they are grieving, when they are sick, when they are sad, when they’ve just had a baby, when it is time to celebrate that person, when they live alone, when they are working too hard, or just because you feel like it.  It does not have to be elaborate.
23. I have a sharing box outside of our house, right by the sidewalk.  Sometimes, I put puzzles in it, garden seeds, books, and for the last year, homemade masks.  Sometimes, people put things in it, too.  Once, someone put solar strand lights in there, and I got to decorate the outside of the box so that it lit up at night.  Another time a person put a thank you note and a big piece of quartz in it.  I keep that quartz where I can see it, to remind me that kindness breeds kindness.
24. My dad died fairly recently after a very long battle with ALS.  I and my siblings helped my mom write thank you notes to all the people who have been there for them and now her. She’d send me emails saying what to thank people for, and I’d write the cards.  It was wild just how many big and little things people did for my parents while my dad was still alive, and then for my mom after his death.  Things like bringing food and meals, clearing her driveway after every snow, offering to drive her places, visiting my dad in the care facility, singing and praying with him, the list of things to thank people for was and is inspiring.  No single person did more than they could handle, but everyone put together did and still does so much.
25. Once, when I was cashiering at a store, these 2 Japanese men came up to the counter.  They spoke very little English and I made a big effort to help them and understand them and connect with them.  They made a similar effort.  One of them pulled out these really cool wooden tops and started spinning them on the counter.  I was fascinated by the tops and we spent a pretty long time playing with them together and not talking.  Then, they went to leave and the one man pushed the tops toward me and pointed at me.  He wanted me to keep these really cool tops.  I still have them and sometimes my kids pull them out and play with them, and they know the story of the kindness of a stranger from a faraway place.
26. When my husband and I were first dating, he had just gone through a divorce and I was in grad school.  Neither of us had much extra money at that moment, and he was being sent to Paris for a business trip.  Our friend, Sam, told my husband that Paris is just so much better when you have a partner with you, and he paid for my airline ticket so that I could come along, no strings attached.
27. In Paris, we tried very hard to speak the little French we’d learned.  By the end of every day, we were mentally exhausted.  On one of those days, I went up to a postcard stand and I could not for the life of me figure out what coins to give the man at the stand.  I held out a hand full of coins and stared helplessly.  He gently and slowly picked through my assorted change and took the correct amount.  The kindness was in the look on his face and the slowing of the pace of our transaction: I could tell that he knew what was happening to me, that thinking in a different language all day had crushed my brain.  That experience made me feel how important it is to slow down and be patient and kind to people I meet here whose first language is not English.  They are working way harder than me to get through the day, every day.
28. For a couple of years in my twenties, I was on food stamps.  I was not proud of this fact and I never knew what sort of judgment I’d be met with when I pulled them out to pay for my food.  More people were respectful than were not, and I felt kindness from those that did not offer judgment and who treated me like I was an equal human being.  It helped me get through a difficult time in my life.  Sometimes the biggest kindness is to just accept a person as they are in that moment in time, without judging or making up a story about them.
29. When I was really little, I loved Henrietta the Cat from Mr. Rogers Enchanted Kingdom.  One day, I was standing with my mom while she was purchasing groceries and I was meowing away, channeling Henrietta in my little kid bubble.  Most cashiers never really noticed me, but this one, wow, she looked right at me and said, “Oh! You are Henrietta the Cat!”  I was blown away that she knew about Henrietta and that she bothered to talk to me, that she didn’t seem to want anything from me, and I proceeded to meow excitedly to her, and she listened!  Most busy adults tend to hardly notice kids just as they are, but guaranteed, the kids notice them.  I never forgot that moment of being seen and heard in that real, simple, but true way.
30. In a similar vein, when I was about the same age, I had a huge crush on my brother’s friend, Eric Greenleaf, who was maybe 12 or 13.  I knew he was coming over one day, and I decided to pretend that I had a broken arm.  I wrapped toilet paper all up and down my arm.  I must have looked ridiculous.  But Eric Greenleaf didn’t bat an eye, even though he could have just looked at me and laughed.  Instead, he looked at me and said, “Oh, Ely, it looks like you broke your arm!” How this kid could have been so understanding and could see what the little girl in front of him needed at that moment, this still touches me today.  Choosing to take anyone seriously is a profound act of kindness.
31. There is an older woman in my neighborhood named Maria.  I met her about 10 years ago, because she was picking up trash in a park where I would take my kids to play when they were babies, and she stopped to talk with me.  This park is used by all sorts of people, ranging from the unhoused to the local tech company employees on their breaks.  There is always trash to pick up.  She still does this, every week, just because.
32. Our son has had some multi-day stays at Childrens Hospital for some scary reasons.  His sister wasn’t allowed on the ward, so friends stepped up to let her stay with them for several days each time so that we could both be with our son. Knowing that she was okay and with people that we trusted meant so much to us.
33. While staying at Childrens, we really got to witness the kindness of the volunteers there, and felt their absence when they were not.  Without the volunteers, the kids can’t have access to the playrooms on each ward, and when you are there for several days, or weeks, or months, or even years, you want to be able to use those playrooms, and you want to know that people who aren’t just there for their jobs, actually care about you and everyone who is stuck there.  There’s also this TV studio in the hospital that Ryan Seacrest donated to Children’s.  Kids who are able to leave their rooms can come down to play bingo or be part of the broadcast that goes to all the rooms in the hospital, so that the kids who can’t leave their rooms can play bingo through the broadcast.  We were so moved by this addition to the hospital and all the volunteers who were making it happen.  It was clear that the kids who have to be there much more than our son had to, got so much out of it, and were even able to connect with each other through it.
34. My son had 4 surgeries in one year when he was second grade.  After two of the surgeries, he was not supposed to run or jump for six weeks.  There were kids who kindly understood this and chose to play chess or checkers with him during his lunch recess, even on the beautiful, sunny days where everyone wanted to run around.  I don’t think he once, during those six weeks, spent a recess alone.
35. When I was in college, I lived off campus with a group of friends.  The man across the street from us really did not like college students and posted “No trespassing” signs all over his property.  We felt a bit unwelcome and assumed all the locals on our street felt the same way he did about us.  One day after injuring my knee pretty badly, I was hobbling down the street in a brace, and there was this old couple who lived next to the “No trespassing” guy who stood and stared at me, and then said something.  I stopped, bracing myself, ready for whatever unwelcoming thing they were going to say, and instead, the man said, “How did you hurt yourself?”  He was actually concerned.  Over the next couple of years, we got to know each other.  He had this massive rose garden and loved to bring me roses.  She was a quilter and loved to show me all the amazing quilts she had done.
36. When I was 16, I silkscreened two matching tee-shirts: one for me and one for my best friend for her birthday.  I made a very simple cartoon moose on the shirts, because she loved the animal.  I was embarrassed by how simplistic the design was and said something about how it wasn’t great art in front of her grandmother who was a professional artist.  She got really serious and told me that good artists can add personality to the simplest of things, and that I had done that successfully, that my little moose had a lot of personality.  I never forgot that life-changing moment where this older woman took me and my art seriously, which opened me up to doing the sort of art I went on to do when I later became an art major in college.
37. Once, an old boyfriend and I were on a walk and waiting for the crosswalk sign to change.  A man walked up to us who seemed mentally ill and possibly unhoused and definitely rough and tumble.  He looked at us and said, “It’s all good,” then proceeded to accompany us for a few blocks, talking to us about all sorts of topics that to us seemed unrelated, but to him made sense.  We weren’t in a rush, and we just listened, partly because we didn’t really know what else to do in that situation.  He eventually wound down, let us know that he needed to go take his anti-psychotics, because he was overdue for his dose, and went on his merry way.  Before he left, he told us, “When I first saw you, I thought you were a gay couple, so I told you it was all good because I wanted you to know that I was all right with that.”  He’d been reaching out from his place on the fringe of society to us, who he’d perceived as being on a different sort of fringe, to let us know he accepted us as we were.
38. In the first year I lived in Boulder, I was hospitalized for 5 days with complicated appendicitis.  I didn’t know many people here very well yet, but my roommate at the time had a tight knit community of friends. He told his friends that were still just acquaintances to me, to visit me in the hospital.  Also, some people who I was still getting to know from my school and work came to visit.  My then-boyfriend-now-husband, who I was also still getting to know, came and read to me every day.  It made all the difference in the world to have visitors.  Nobody did anything fancy, they just came and sat with me from the beginning when I was barely able to notice them, through to the end when I had enough energy to laugh with them because the medicine made me loopy.
39. While I was hospitalized for the appendicitis, I did not have insurance, was living off of my student loans and a part-time job, and I received many medical bills.  I had to pay each medical professional thousands of dollars from out of my empty pocket.  Trying to figure out how to pay these bills after not being able to work and while trying to recover from this huge medical event was overwhelming.  I called each medical office, and there were many, to ask if I could have a discount.  Only one office refused to give me a discount or even to allow me to set up installments, but the rest gave me varying discounts, some let me pay in installments over time, and this helped so much.  But even more impactful were the times I was treated like a fellow human being by the people arranging the payment plans.
40. The short time in my life in which I struggled financially really exposed to me just how badly people with no money can be treated.  I had a few experiences with doctors who made assumptions about me based on my appearance and financial situation, one in particular who assumed that I was looking to score painkillers when I came to the ER, and felt that I was pretending to have the severe back spasms that were taking my breath away.  (I actually hate being on painkillers).  He did not treat me kindly.  This experience with unkindness made me truly appreciate that the simple act of treating people like they are humans equal to you makes a powerful difference.  I always felt deeply moved by the kindness of the doctors who, during this time, treated me exactly the same as I imagined they treated their rich patients.
41. There is a marshy kind of area on a bike path not far from us.  It seemed flooded, so my son and I stopped to look. A man came up to us and asked us if we’d seen the beaver dam that was causing the flooding, then told us where to find it and the beaver home nearby.  He also pointed out a muskrat swimming in the water.  We visit this pond all the time now, and have watched as more beaver homes show up.  We might never have noticed if that man hadn’t taken the time to stop and share.
42. Our first child ate like a linebacker during her first year of life, and then suddenly lost interest in food for a while.  As a first-time parent, I freaked out.  As my husband and I were walking with her to the grocery store, I ranted about how she was going to starve and be malnourished and I didn’t know what to do about it.  I mean, I was truly a wreck.  At the grocery store, we met a woman whose 11 year old son thought our baby girl was adorable.  He played with her, he carried her around while we got into a conversation with this woman.  We got talking about food.  She told me that when her own, now very strong and vibrant 11 year old was little, he also did not eat. She passed on to us something that someone told her at the time: “Kids live on the idea of food until they are at least 9.”  She also said that for a while, they’d joke that one day of the week was “eating day,” because that was about how often her son had an appetite.  The kindness in sharing her experience with me changed everything, and sure enough, our daughter did not starve or get malnourished, and we felt much less alone as parents of a child who lived on the idea of food for a while.
43. Back in the 90s, I had a temp job working at a ravioli company.  I got in a conversation with the dish washer, who was from Sri Lanka, had 3 other jobs and was attending college, and was shockingly cheerful about it.  He described a childhood of civil wars, loss of friends and family members to the strife, and friendships that went really deep.  He told me he got to the US because a group of friends decided that he should come here for school.  Without his knowledge, they pooled together money, and it sounds like they also applied to college for him, and sent him off the US so he could get a degree.
44. My job for two summers was cleaning dorms.  It was me, who was a hippie college student, and the regular yearlong crew, which was a group of southern women who lived up in the hollers and whose accents were so thick that it took me weeks to understand what they were saying.  We couldn’t be more different than each other, but we tried to connect anyway.  One of the ways that I entertained myself while cleaning the empty dorm rooms all summer was to collect the change I’d find on the floor.  At the end of the last summer, just before I moved across the country, the women wanted to give me a going away gift.  They told me that they couldn’t figure out what to get me, since I didn’t wear makeup or perfume, and I didn’t seem to be into anything they were into.  They gave me a giant jar of change, and told me, “Well, we know for a fact that you like collecting change, so we’ve had this jar of all the coins we’ve collected in the past few years, and we want you to have it.”  Best workplace gift ever.
45. I went to the same school from 1st through 8th grade.  By 8th grade, some kids had become popular, some had not.  I had most definitely not.  It was confusing for me: most of us had all been in the same school for 8 years, and I didn’t understand what made some kids popular and some not.  It was also painful for me.  I felt pretty ugly and like an outcast from a place I had once been a part of.  My classmates had lobbied the school to have a dance, and we all went.  I felt awkward in my incredibly unstylish dress and I didn’t think anyone would want to dance with me, except maybe some other outcasts. Out of the blue, Peter Garvey who’d managed to become good-looking and popular, asked me to dance.  I had a feeling he did it to be kind, but he did it in such a way that I didn’t feel bad, I felt cared for and for a moment I felt like I was part of the community we all used to be part of.  If I could find him today, I’d thank him for that dance.
46. I also used to shoplift when I was in 8th grade.  I had a friend who was into that and I wanted to impress her, because I was desperate for her approval.  At the same time, I had a friend who was most definitely not into shoplifting.  One day, I noticed that she had been distancing herself from me so I asked her what was going on.  She told me that it really bothered her that I shoplifted and it scared her to go out with me because what if I shoplifted when I was with her and she got associated with it and got in trouble too?  She then told me that she couldn’t be my friend anymore if I continued to shoplift.  I never did it again.  Her kindness was directed toward herself and respecting her own truth, and this spilled over into my world.  She wasn’t trying to change me, she was telling me truthfully that she had a boundary and if I couldn’t respect it, she couldn’t be my friend.  I never shoplifted again, and our friendship lasted a long time after that.  Sometimes, saying something truthful that feels unkind is actually the kindest thing a person can do.
47. One of my first jobs after college was coaching Special Olympics basketball and track, plus doing specialized recreation.  Having spent the last four years as a hippie art major and the last couple of months living on my bike on the road, I was rather feral in my approach to hygiene.  My boss somehow managed to tell me, kindly but firmly, what no one else had told me before:  I smelled bad and I needed to shower more frequently, and on top of that, I couldn’t show up to work wearing tie-dyed boxers as if they were shorts.  I came home and channeled my embarrassment into indignation, and ranted to my boyfriend at the time about it.  I think I expected him to tell me how rude my boss had been, but instead, he eagerly gave me advice about what worked for him to keep himself from smelling bad.  Then another friend of mine shared his own fragrance techniques.  In this whole experience, I felt completely accepted as a fellow human who just needed a little hygiene guidance.  It can be kind to tell people what their impact is on others, even the smelly stuff.
48. In the same conversation with my boss, she told me that I was letting all of the kids on the team run all over me, and that I had to be more assertive and enforce the rules more, and that she couldn’t keep me on as a coach if I didn’t act like one.  She was right- I spent many practices not saying anything while the kids went wild.  Many of these kids had behavioral disorders, some came from incredibly unstable homes, many had ADHD, and they needed structure and a leader.  My boss told me that I needed to be more firm and confident, that I needed to lead, I needed to enforce rules, I needed to coach.   I didn’t know it at the time, but she was teaching me the difference between being aggressive and being assertive.  I was so afraid of being seen as an “aggressive woman” at that time, I completely had gone limp.  When I learned to be an assertive coach, I discovered that these kids were hungry for good leadership, rules that made sense, and structured boundaries that they couldn’t trample.  By telling me about this, my boss modeled assertiveness, leadership, rule enforcement and structured boundaries. It turned out, I needed these things as much as the kids did.
49. We have a little patch of grass and weeds that we cut with a handpowered reel mower.  One rainy spring, the grass grew tall enough to make this job a bit of a struggle.  I was doing battle with it when a man pulled up in his landscaping truck.  “Ma’am, please let me get my ride-on mower out and do this for you!”  It took him less than five minutes.  I tried paying him.  He refused and said if his mother were ever out struggling like he saw me struggling, he would want someone to help her.  It made me laugh, only because he was probably about 10 years younger than me, but the sentiment was kind, and I was grateful.
50. I used to cashier at a grocery store.  Every week, a woman in her eighties came through my line on the same day.  She told me that this was her day to buy groceries for her friend who was too old to get them for herself, and I could tell that it made her happy to be able to do this for her friend.  It can feel just as good to give kindness as it feels to receive it, and you are never too old to be kind.

I have really enjoyed writing about these fifty kindnesses, and I hope you have some to share, too.  Please feel free to use the comment section to share kindnesses you have seen, done, had done for you.