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Susan Spencer, Editor-in-Chief of Woman’s Day writes one of the magazine’s most popular columns, the Kindness Project, which showcases readers’ acts of kindness. As a result of the column, Spencer amassed hundreds of stories of kindnesses, and through compiling them and writing about them, found that she began to notice acts of kindness around her every day. “A man helping an elderly stranger into a seat on a bus,” she writes, “a bunch of zinnias from a community garden appearing on a sick neighbor’s doorstep.” And as she became more “attuned to kindnesses,” she found she was increasingly inspired to perform acts of kindness, herself.
When talking about “attuning” our awareness to kindness, I sometimes use the metaphor of a radio. Like radio signals, kindness signals are always there, but we’re not always tuned in enough to pick them up. When we’re trying to pick up a new station, it can be hard to tune the dial to just the right spot where we'll get the strongest signal. It takes practice for our awareness to be strongly enough attuned to easily see the opportunities around us, but the more we tune the dial to the kindness signal, the more we notice them. Then, the more we notice them, the more grateful we are for them, and the more opportunities we see to share kindnesses, ourselves.
Now Spencer has turned her popular column into a book, and created a yearlong signal-booster to help all of us become more attuned to kindnesses. In her new book, When Action Follows Heart, she provides 365 ways to share kindness, such as: “When you’re cleaning snow and ice off your car in a parking lot, do the next car over as well,” and “Collect extra cell phone chargers and donate them to a local hospital. Then people visiting loved ones can focus on the patient, not on battery life.” When I read this one: “When you’re done with a great book, give it to a friend you think would enjoy it,” I was reminded of the time at an airport when I ran into a friend who had finished reading a book on her plane—and gave it to me! All the suggestions in the book come from the experiences of real people, including Spencer, who left a gift card on the windshield of a parked car she had (lightly) bumped.
As Spencer observes, “A single act of kindness, whether to a friend or a stranger, can become a spool of generosity that unwinds and touches the lives of so many.” You’ve probably heard stories about Starbucks drive-though lines in which someone pays for the next person’s coffee, and then the next person does the same, creating a kindness chain. Especially in this polarized and divided moment, these things can seem surprising—so surprising, in fact, that they make the news. But chains of kindness happen all the time. Kindness is contagious. When someone sees you running to catch an elevator and holds it for you, you’re probably more likely to do the same thing the next time you see someone running for the elevator you’re already in. Those are the kinds of commonplace, everyday acts of kindness that don’t make the news, but can have as big an effect on people as the ones that do.
Yet, one thing I hear frequently from people who embark on A Year of Kindness—a yearlong journey of journaling about gratitude and the kind things you do each day—is that for the first few weeks, when sitting down with the journal, people can’t remember any kind things they did. This can be discouraging, but it is generally not an indication that the person is insufficiently kind; it's often because of not being strongly attuned to our own acts of kindness. There are many things we do that other people experience as meaningful kindnesses, but which we don’t think back on as acts of kindness. Letting someone merge in front of you in traffic might not be noteworthy for you, but it can have a transformative effect on that driver who, after putting out fires all day at work, thought she would be late to see her child's science fair presentation until you helped her get there on time. We enact these kindnesses every day. We just don't always notice them. With her new book, Spencer gives us hundreds of ways to notice ourselves being intentionally kind, and that is a great way to become more attuned to kindness—both our own, and others'.
In the process of compiling these stories of kindness, Spencer came to the realization that the book is about more than kindness. “It’s about the instinct to reach out to others to connect,” she writes, “and the warmth we feel when we genuinely help someone. It’s about forgiveness, civility, mercy, and love.”
As Spencer knows, “Kindness is exactly what we need in our fractured world right now—it provides the simplest path to healing.”
What are we waiting for? As Spencer suggests, “Let’s all begin.” ♦
When Action Follows Heart is available to pre-order now at your favorite bookseller, and at Target. It will be released on April 17th, 2018.
