Conference hydra::dejavu

1588.0. "Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty" by DSSDEV::GRIFFIN (Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty) Fri Dec 06 1991 14:37

    
    from off the net....
    

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                              PRACTICE
                          RANDOM KINDENESS
                                AND
                     SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY

It's a crisp winter day in San Francisco. A woman in a red Honda, Christ-
mas presents piled in the back, drives up to the Bay Bridge tollbooth.
"I'm paying for myself, and for the six cars behind me," she says with a
smile, handing over seven commuter tickets.

One after another, the next six drivers arrive at the tollbooth, dollars
in hand, only to be told, "Some lady up ahead already paid your fare.
Have a nice day."

The woman in the Honda, it turned out, had read something on an index
card taped to a friend's refrigerator: "Practice random kindness and
senseless acts of beauty." The phrase seemed to leap out at her, and she
copied it down.

Judy Foreman spotted the same phrase spray-painted on a warehouse wall a
hundred miles from her home. When it stayed on her mind for days, she
gave up and drove all the way back to copy it down. "I thought it was
incredibly beautiful," she said explaning why she's taken to writing it
at the bottom of all her letters, "like a message from above."

Her husband, Frank, liked the phrase so much that he put it up on the
wall for his seventh graders, one of whom was the daughter of a local
columnist. The columnist put it in the paper, admitting that though she
liked it, she didn't know where it came from [sic] or what it really
meant.

Two days later, she heard from Anne Herbert. Tall, blonde, and forty,
Herbert lives in Marin, one of the country's ten richest counties, where
she house-sits, takes odd-jobs, and gets by. It was in a Sausalito
restaurant that Herbert jotted the phrase down on a paper place mat,
after turning it around in her mind for days.

"That's wonderful!" a man sitting nearby said, and copied it down
carefully on his own placemat.

"Here's the idea," Herbert says. "anything you think there should be
more of, do it randomly."

Her own fantasies include: (1) breaking into depressing-looking schools
to paint the classrooms, (2) leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in the
poor parts of town, (3) slipping money into a proud old woman's purse.
Says Herbert, "kindness can build on itself as much as violence can."
Now the phrase is spreading, on bumper stickers, on walls, at the bottom
of letters and business cards. And as it spreads, so does a vision of
guerrilla goodness.

In Portland, Oregon, a man might plunk a coin into a stranger's meter
just in time. In Patterson, New Jersey, a dozen people with pails and
mops and tulip bulbs might descend on a run-down house and clean it from
top to bottom while the frail elderly owners look on, dazed and smiling.
In Chicago, a teenage boy may be shoveling off the driveway when the
impulse strikes. What the hell, nobody's looking, he thinks, and shovels
the neighbor's driveway, too.

It's positive anarchy, disorder, a sweet disturbance. A woman in Boston
writes "Merry Christmas!" to the tellers on the back of her checks. A
man in St. Louis, whose car has just been rear-ended by a young woman,
waves her away, saying, "It's a scratch. Don't Worry."

Senseless acts of beauty spread: A man plants daffodils along the
roadway, his shirt billowing in the breeze from passing cars. In
Seattle, a man appoints himself a one man vigilante sanitation service
and roams the concrete hills collecting litter in a supermarket cart. In
Atlanta, a man scrubs graffiti from a green park bench.

They say you can't smile without cheering yourself up a little --
likewise, you can't commit a random act of kindeness without feeling as
if your own troubles have been lightened if only because the world has
become a slightly better place.

And you can't be a recipient without feeling a shock, a pleasant jolt.
If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found your bridge fare
paid, who knows what you might have been inspired to do for someone else
later? Wave someone on in the intersection? Smile at a tired clerk? Or
something larger, greater? Like all revolutions, guerrilla goodness
begins slowly, with a single act. Let it be yours.



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    Here's a blank check.  Anyone in need should feel free to print it and use
    it.  Merry Christmas.                            
    
       
    

    re: .1 (::FARNHAM)
    
          I can appreciate the sentiment; however, let me ask you
    something:
          "Better to Give" --you say.  Better than what?  I ask.
    And why?
    
    Frederick
    

    I think this should read:  Practice KINDNESS and random acts of beauty.  
    
    I don't think beauty is ever senseless.

	re. - 1   thank YOU!

	I need that!

	

    
          I sit here thinking of all of you,and shed a tear of joy.For you
    are all part of the wonderful people of the world.
    
                                     For this  buds for you.
                                      Merry christmas.

    
    	For a great example of .0 in action, read the short story 
    	"One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts" by Shirley Jackson, author of
    	"The Lottery".
    
    	Of course, being a Shirley Jackson story, there is a dark side
    	to it.
    
    	rjc

    
    	All is not lost...
    
    	WE need to PULL together...

    RE: -1
    
    Ok, you organise it.
    
    Laurie.

    
    
    		Doing a good deed towards another as the base
    
    		note suggested is a good start...

    RE: .9
    
    No, it means I cannot believe people really believe that stuff.
    
    Laurie.

    
    Re.-1
    
    What stuff, Laurie?
    
    Cindy

    You're not going to catch me out like that Cindy. ;^) You know
    perfectly well what I mean.
    
    Laurie.

    
    Re.13
    
    Laurie,
    
    >You know perfectly well what I mean.
    
    Oh Rats.  Of all people, I didn't count on you being able to read 
    minds.  (;^}
    
    Anyway, from another topic, here's the reference to the Fourth.
    
    Cindy
    
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    From: "The Hero With A Thousand Faces", by Joseph Campbell, p.267

    "The cosmogonic cycle pulses forth into manifestation and back 
    into nonmanifestation amidst a silence of the unknown.  The
    Hindus represent this mystery in the holy syllable AUM.  Here
    the sound A represents waking consciousness, U dream consciousness,
    M deep sleep.  The silence surrounding the syllable is the unknown:
    it is called simply "The Fourth." [Mandukya Upanishad, 8-12]  The
    syllable itself is God as creator-preserver-destroyer, but the 
    silence of God is eternal, absolutely uninvolved in all the
    openings-and-closings of the round.

        "It is unseen, unrelated, inconceivable,
           uninferable, unimaginable, indescribable.
         It is the essense of the one self-cognition
           common to all states of consciousness.
         All phenomena cease in it.
         It is peace, it is bliss, it is nonduality.

                       [Mandukya Upanishad, 7]

    
    Curious... How are the random act of kindness and senseless acts of
    beauty coming along?
    
    

    re: .15
    
    I practice it quite a lot, but I don't feel any urge to tell the world
    of my deeds. Perhaps, if there really is Somebody Up There, she will be
    nodding in approval. Egg and Chips for me in Heavan then.
    
    Dougie
    

                        
    
    
    I too practice random kindness. I believe it makes a difference.
    
                          Later,
                           Mark