150-11-08-2010

Can We Trace Human Kindness?

By W. Owen Thornton BA

In conversation with a friend, I told him that we were concerned about money.  We’d had a lot of breakdowns of household items of late, and our car was dying and … fees for my Masters Candidacy at Sir Wilfred Laurier University were due soon.  Because I was attending school at the grad school level my wife and I had thought about buying some kind of laptop computer for taking notes and creating powerpoint presentations etc. but we were getting stressed about the added expense.  And then my friend said, “I have an old laptop that I’m not using anymore.  You could have that.”

“Have?  Surely you want …”

“No.  It hasn’t done anything for a couple of years.  It’s just sat in a filing cabinet doing nothing.  Let me see if my assistant can wipe the memory and reinstall the basic software and if she can, it’s yours to have.”

I was and continue to be blown away by the generosity and by the serendipity of this chance meeting (earlier this year another chance meeting ended up with us receiving a free, used television too, so life HAS been good!).  Even if the laptop does nothing but work in an ‘okay’ fashion for a couple of months, it sets back the costs and gives me an opportunity to discover what kinds of things I want in such a purchase.  I wondered why this good fortune had befallen me.  There have been times when I had hoped something like that might have happened and it didn’t.  But this time … out of the blue … when I least expected it … a divine act of human kindness graced my life.

I began to wonder what I might have done to invoke such good fortune.  I don’t think I’m a better person today, than I was say even two years ago (when I wasn’t receiving cool, free stuff) … but that assessment was incorrect too because back then I received a free trip to Disney courtesy of my in-laws.  But surely I’m not any different than I was say five years ago and these kinds of things didn’t happen to me then.  So what has changed?  Now there doesn’t have to be an answer to my question, “Can we trace human kindness to other acts or deeds that we have done in the past?”  My point is we say we do acts of human kindness because they are good for the universe and because when you put good stuff out there … somehow, it tends to vicariously find its way back to us.  We may not have proof of this, but I believe most would say this is an anecdotal truth.  Let me cite two more specific examples of human kindness “tracking”.

I remember when I purchased some nice pens with the corporate logo on them.  For me, they were pretty expensive.  I only bought 50 of them, and gave them away to clients, prospective clients and family and friends.  It wasn’t long after that, that I remember receiving a lot of free pens in return.  Certainly the count wasn’t a one-for-one ratio, and neither were all the pens of the same caliber as mine, but, it was curious that I did receive a lot of pens after giving out a lot of pens.  In one instance, the client so liked the quality of pen that I gave him, that he ordered the same type with his logo on them, and then, he gave me one of them right back to me about three weeks later!

And I remember another time when I was doing a lot of teaching on effective writing, effective listening and dealing with difficult people courses.  I had a “thing” in my classes to reward people with monopoly money when they contributed to the conversation.  The person at the end of the day with the most fake money won a business book.  I remember shortly after doing that for a while that I began to receive free books in return.  I think this one was interesting because I didn’t often receive books I wanted to read, but what someone else thought I wanted to read.  I think in retrospect, that I might have been giving out books in the same manner, so I thought that giving a book strategy didn’t work very well.  (In that case, better to have given gift certificates to a bookstore!)  Now let me return to the free lap-top story.

Now in the instance of receiving an admittedly older, but free laptop, I cannot say that I gave away laptops to others and that because of that one has now returned to me.  I’ve never owned one to give away, so unlike the pens and the books, the cycle of human kindness or my ability to track human kindness hasn’t played out quite so closely.  But I have admitted on these pages that human kindness isn’t always a one-for-one direct correlation.  I believe it was Norman Vincent Peale (one of my heroes (and I have eerie evidence that I predicted the date of his death, so I don’t write fictional stories about real people dying in them anymore!)) who wrote that when good fortune is withheld from you for a long time – good fortune that might even be deserved – it is only because even greater things await you.  You see, human kindness may not be pen/book reciprocal and it definitely doesn’t work on any kind of predictable time-line.  Nor does the give and receive nature of human kindness suggest that the person we give something to is the person who will, in turn, do something nice for us.  We just believe that doing kind things for others (with a “right” motivation) is a good thing and that good things beget good things … eventually.  Another way to look at this is, “You get more of what you send!”

So the answer to my question, can I trace anything that I did that might warrant me receiving a laptop?  There are three parts to this question.  One, it may be that there is nothing I did to warrant that kind of gift.  But maybe it was a host of things that I’ll never know about or consider.  My wife and I did give away a chair to a friend.  And we never have garage sales: we give our stuff to people … so maybe in all that stuff there were other gems for other folk: personal stories of receiving cool stuff at a fortuitous time from their point of view that I will never know about.  I have written a weblog about human kindness for over four years … maybe those good thoughts warrant a free, used laptop during time of financial stress.  Two: I have gone back to school.  Okay, so that’s not a human kindness action specifically.  But it was a kindness to myself to allow myself to go back to school.  And in going back to school, I have created a positive environment for my life that excites me and that gives me the general attitude that makes me laugh and giggle far more than I ever used to.  So maybe it is going back to school that created an atmosphere or a feeling that put me in a position to receive a lap top or going back to school changed my personality such that it made me the kind of person who can both receive a gift and notice with deep appreciation that I received such a gift.  Three, I told someone what I needed.  I wonder if we don’t receive the help we need because we don’t ask for it … or we don’t tell people our stories (whereby they put two and two together and do the very thing we need, according to our story).  I remember the book Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi who observed that the rich aren’t lucky in getting rich: they ask people for what they need and get the help required.  I’ll be writing more about this in another article.

So, when we are the recipient of an act of human kindness can we trace our own specific acts of human kindness in such a way as to explain why we received something in the nick of time?  The answer may be sometimes, but not always.  Do things come back to us in predictable ways or along predictable time-lines?  No.  So there’s no point in “planning to practice human kindness” for six years in order that you build up enough credit to the universe to have someone give you exactly what you need at the exact right time.  It doesn’t work that way and if you were to make that attempt, manipulating the human kindness cycle of goodness might well corrupt the entire process.  The only human kindness plan we can make in the end, is to be kind generally, over time.  We need to step outside of the blinders of our lives and notice others and what they need and then act accordingly kind whenever we can.  We do this because we believe these kind acts make the world a better place … because we believe that if we do kind acts that sometimes used laptops fall into our hands at just the right time.

So go on.  I dare you.  Practice human kindness right away.  That dream you don’t even know about right now?  It will be completed only by the grace of someone else, who A: doesn’t know your dream right now, but will B: one day do something or give you something that will help to fulfill your new dream.  We throw human kindness to the wind and we forget about it, only to have that wind turn back upon us at times when we most need it.  That’s the kind of world I want to live in.  That’s the kind of world I am attempting to create here.  If I send you a human kindness email once in a while and it reminds you to pop out of your busy, oft-times selfish life (I have a selfish life too!) then it is all worthwhile.  The world becomes a better place.

Cheers and God bless.

Owen