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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/mar/30/rewind-and-be-kind-what-happens-if-you-do-one-act-of-kindness-every-day>
"It has been nearly 14 years since a chance encounter with a stranger in a post
office changed Bernadette Russell’s life forever. The date was Thursday 18
August 2011. For weeks, on the news, as a series of riots broke out across
cities in England, Russell had been inundated with images of young people in
hoodies looting, pillaging and setting buildings on fire.
Now, standing in front of her at her local post office counter in Deptford,
south London, was a young man in a hoodie.
“He must have been in his late teens or early 20s,” she says, “and I remember
thinking: ‘Oh gosh, I bet people might be judging you, because you look like
the images we’ve been seeing on TV. I wonder if you’ve been having a hard
time.’” Then she overheard him say he didn’t have enough money to pay for his
stamp. “So I just said: ‘I can pay it for you.’”
It was a tiny, split-second decision that would have a profound and
long-lasting impact on her life. Before he left, he thanked her “quite a few
times, more than he needed to. That felt quite significant and a little bit sad
really.”
She never saw that young man again. Yet her interaction with him, and the
smiles of the other people who witnessed it, lit a flame inside her that would
burn and burn. Russell had gone into that post office feeling “overwhelmed
about the sheer volume of bad news and the enormity of problems in the world,
that I had absolutely no power to do anything about”. But on the bus, on her
way home, she felt different; empowered. “It made me think about how maybe some
people are more likely to receive kindness than others and how one way to
respond to unkindness is with kindness.”
For days, she had been concerned that people who lived in neighbourhoods like
hers were being demonised. “There was a particular atmosphere in London in the
aftermath of all the unrest; a kind of sadness, of fear. And so our interaction
seemed impactful, not just for us, but for the other people who saw it as
well.”
The moment the idea of carrying out one kind act a day for a year entered her
mind, she decided to do it. “It was quite spontaneous. I thought: ‘I’ll see
what difference this makes,’” she says. “I had no idea what I was letting
myself in for. I’m not sure if I’d known what was coming, I would have started
it so impulsively.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
