A couple nights ago, I told my nephews (just before they went to bed) that we would be going on an adventure when they woke up in the morning… a secret mission. Since we had just watched the movie, Octopussy – James Bond, they were extra excited at the sound of those words, and could hardly contain their little bodies from jumping and trembling with delight.
Morning came… and I finally revealed the mission… we would spend the day spreading random acts of kindness.
After their crinkled faces of disappointment faded away, they decided to trust and believe that, if I said it, then it must be something cool… and they would jump in head first, even if their initial gut reaction was suspicious, puzzled curiosity….
While we ate our bowls of Sugar Pops and Apple Jacks, we carefully and seriously brainstormed a list of as many things as we could think of. Each new idea, more genius than the previous, lit up their faces like a sunbeam rainbow rocket (?)… and they totally got into it…
Hand-drawn cards to send to each of their grandparents. More fancy cards to send to their playmate friends (who live directly across the street). “Uncle Mikey, why are we going to use a stamp to send a card across the street??”
Some classics, like putting quarters in parking meters, hiding money and change in the sandbox of the nearby neighborhood park’s playground for other kids to find. Happy-thought, have-a-nice-day, fortune-cookie-style notes to sneak into their neighbor’s mailboxes. Picking a bowl of fresh blackberries off their backyard blackberry bush, and hand delivering to an unsuspecting next door neighbor. Dropping cut-out coupons in the aisles of the grocery store next to the respective sale items.
We were on a roll and had come up with quite a nice lengthy list.
After the drawing part was over, we addressed all the cards, packed up our box of “kindness-bombs” and hit the street… went through a restaurant’s drive-thru window and paid for the car behind us. “Uncle Mikey, what if they have a family with 15 kids and order a giant amount of food?” Me: “That’s the risk we take. Kindness will not be stopped!”
We took our lunch to the park and had a grande time talking about thoughtfulness and kindness and why they’re so cool. Afterwards, we scoured the entire park, picking up trash. There was another kid playing on the playground while his parents watched, so we had to be stealthy ninjas as we slyly dropped coins around the slide and the swings…
At the post office, while waiting in line, one of my nephews whispered, “Uncle Mikey, how about if we let that person go in front of us?” Excellent.
We then bought a few extra stamps, and sneakily placed them around the self-help stamp dispenser area, as a surprise for someone to find in their time of urgent need.
Everywhere we went, they handed out their “happy-thought” notes… to strangers on the street, to the postman on his route, to anyone we thought needed some happiness… they kept trying to think of new kind acts along the way…. our day’s secret mission was a successful blast…
A couple days later, they were so excited to tell me about their own new random acts of kindness… and how they gave a bottle of water to a homeless guy because it was hot outside… and to the gardening crew… and how they wanted their mom to buy a case of bottled water to keep in the car so they could give them out to any thirsty people they might see…