Random Acts of Kindness - December 2022

A Random Act of Kindness is giving your best self to others without requests or promise of return on investment. It’s simply doing something nice for someone else, without them asking and without you doing it for anything in return.

Kindness is interesting, in that unlike an emotion such as happiness, or a feeling and action like gratitude, kindness is mostly a behavior or action.

Through years of experience, we each have been trained in our thoughts and perspectives of what kindness is, what it means, what the intention behind someone’s kindness is, so that it is often lost what the kind act is.

People are more likely (and it may be something in our genetic code that we’ve learned over the years) to give more to those with whom they have a closer relationship with than those that are of an acquaintance level.

People with certain job titles and duties or even roles in their social environment at home like helping professionals or parents may be expected to offer acts of kindness.

Gift-giving seems to induce expectation of reciprocity, or in other words, a social exchange and equity in a relationship are valued with gifts. It would be nice for us to remember what kindness means. Kindness means being nice or offering the best of yourself to someone whether it be a minute, second, or longer. Remembering the meaning helps to think about an act of kindness in a different way.