The Trouble with Kindness

I was not expecting to have such difficulty with my 33 Acts of Kindness project.  Yet it is already April, and I find that I am struggling.

One challenge that I'm running into is that part of my agreement in doing this was to avoid repeating the same act in different situations.  That makes it particularly challenging.  I'll be in line at Starbucks on one of my days home with the little one, and think, Hey!  I know!  I'll buy the order for the person behind me... oh, crap.  I already did that one.

Do you see the irony here?  I'm NOT doing acts of kindness that I would otherwise do because I've done them already and they won't "count" toward my 33 for the year. 

Perhaps this is what happens when people are overly perfectionistic.

I have decided to revisit this entire project.  I will continue to do acts of kindness, even if it's the same one over and over again.  If something new occurs to me, I will do it.  This takes me to my second issue which, oddly enough, was the reason I imposed the "don't do the same thing twice" rule to begin with.

Being kind in new ways can be anxiety-provoking.

It's like being new at anything.  Whenever I attempt to do something that is outside of my comfort zone, it is exciting and frightening all at once.  Buying things for people is a very easy way for me to be kind.  Turning around at a church service to tell a young woman how inspiring and courageous I thought she was for leaving her native country due to the threat of persecution for her sexual orientation was much more challenging.  In a way, it can be fun to challenge myself to do things in a way that is not the norm, and to see what happens.  Often, I find that it opens doors that would have otherwise remained closed, or brings me closer to new people or opportunities that I might not have had exposure to otherwise. 

This activity, the 33 acts of kindness, is interesting.  It's bringing into focus some of the ways in which I sabotage myself and act in excessively self-limiting ways.  It's amusing to see where I get stuck, and amusing to see how I haven't seen it before.  It's also interesting and liberating to see what happens when I do things differently, and how tiny changes tend to have a ripple effect, creating a cascade of increasingly larger changes.