Small Gestures of Kindness

Over on The Write Moms, Bloggers are answering Martin Luther King’s most persistent and urgent question: What are you doing for others? These are the LITTLE things I do.. the small gestures of kindness…

My addiction to the claw machine has gotten me way too many stuffed animals for my kids, so I find great pleasure in giving them to a random kid at the store, and the smile on their face when a stranger hands them a stuffed animal is worth every dollar I put in that machine. You can’t spoil a child with comfort.

When I have money to give without impeding on my bills, I like to donate directly to homeless people, and I love giving them a $50 bill. They act like they won the lottery when you do that. I also like to dump money in the offering plate at church and random charity boxes like the Make a Wish Foundation and Ronald McDonald Houses (that’s a really great charity by the way). This last Christmas I filled up a shoe box for a child, and I had fun shopping for that. It was totally worth venturing out on Thanksgiving to get a good deal on a tablet.

I open doors for people. I try to make it a habit to open doors for everyone around me when I enter or exit a building.

I believe in social responsibility, even if the company I’m working for does not. I mean this in the sense that I feel a corporation is responsible for giving back to the community it leeches its existence from. When I had a job working for someone else, I forced good deeds and integrity on my company. The nonprofit I worked at, not only were we helping our community by mission, but I made certain our reports were accurate to the penny (integrity). I wouldn’t let anyone waste donated money or government grant money on unnecessary things. I got the organization more involved in the community with different projects going on, like local charity drives. When I managed tax offices for a guy who really wanted me to prove to him every hour that I made him more money than he paid me, and I did, I incorporated discount coupons for giving blood and donating books to soldiers overseas. I called it The Good Deed Discount. Now that I work for myself, I am more free to give back, but the fact is, we can all make our companies we work for do more good by doing it for the company in the name of the company. Every corporation is defined by their employees, not their executives.

I listen when people talk. You’d be amazed at how much people half-ass listening. Many listen only for opportunity to argue. Not many people listen to understand someone, and I try to. I not only listen to all the words paying careful attention to things like, “I think” vs, “It is,” as well as “and” vs “or,” but I try to figure out the emotions involved, and I psychoanalyze in order to help me realize what the conversation is really about, to dig deeper for the person’s needs. It’s not easy because most people don’t want you in that far, and when they realize you went there, they just make their walls bigger and thicker. Some people just don’t want help. They just want a place to release their words. Then on top of it, most people don’t even listen to themselves, and liars can never keep their stories straight. Listening is one of the hardest arts to master, and that’s after you get through the conscious barrier to discipline yourself to do it.

Everyone hates waiting in line. I do. I get really impatient when I’m racing the clock to get home in time for my husband to leave for work on time, or when I leave my kids in the car for ease to run in somewhere real quick, and in those cases, that’s usually when I get behind someone requesting if 10 lottery tickets are winners, and then wanting to buy 10 more lottery tickets. BUT I try to remind myself, it’s more important to be patient than it is to be on time, unless the kids are in the car alone, then I run out and check on them every 5 seconds defeating the purpose. But when I’m at the grocery store without kids, in no real hurry, and a woman with kids gets in line behind me, I usually let her ahead of me. Kids suck at waiting in line, and I just think moms should get a break once in a while.

My Nonprofit Projects:

 

I give back to the art and design community by creating free fonts and moving some of my illustrations and photography into the public domain, all available on doodlegraphs.com.

The Write Moms is intended to be a non-profit-ish project designed to feature other bloggers and small business owners. Any money we make in the future will go to the writers and bloggers, not a Net Income line. I would love to turn this into a platform that spreads goodness and changes the world into a better place, a voice of mothers that is often ignored in the home, and pay them enough for it to feel like a job.

 

I’m sure there are more things I do on the small scale I hit, things I am sure everyone does to an extent. Like you may not open doors for everyone, but I’m sure there’s a small gesture of kindness you do that I haven’t thought to do. These small things really make a larger impact than we realize, or so I’d like to believe.