Practice Random Kindness Acts
PRACTICE RANDOM KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY
“It’s a crisp winter day in San Francisco. A woman in a red Honda, Christmas 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, Anne lives in Marin, one of the country’s ten richest counties, where she house-sits, takes odd-jobs, and Ê