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Missions of Guerilla Goodness
by Patience Salgado
“Go, go, go!” I yelled. She hopped in the car, slammed the door and we sped away laughing. It was a day of “ding dong ditchin’” with my 10-year-old niece. We went to a small field to pick sunflowers from an old farmer in Southside and left bunches of the deep yellow beauties on doorsteps all over Richmond.
“Hope is never too far away. Maybe this will help you find it,” Madeleine wrote on the tag we attached to a bouquet. This particular brand of kindness, the random anonymous act, thrilled us both; it was a new bliss to experience together.
The power of kindness has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Years ago my mother packed me and my three sisters in an old olive green VW Dasher and traveled rural Pennsylvania delivering meals, dropping in on a struggling friend, befriending check-out girls on various errands. This was my first introduction to kindness work. We didn’t talk about it very much; my parents just lived it, day in and day out. You could say they were do-gooders, but it was much more than that. This way of living ran deep, almost as if it was all they were sure of and all they really knew how to do.
While I knew this way of being in the world had been woven into my family story, I was longing to write my own. I found myself packing my own kids in the car, just like my mother had. My inherited love of strangers and a deeper connection with myself and the world took hold in the form of exchanges of kindness. Tiny notes left in books at the library, a long conversation with an elderly man in the supermarket, a cold drink for a bum on the street, all of it energized my soul in a way nothing else did or could.
Kindness began to drive me, to define me, to un-do me, and little did I know the power it would have over me, my life, my entire world. Big or small, kind acts seem to work their way into the places we need it most, showing us how tender and strong we all really are, exposing just how much we all need to be loved. It became obvious how much I needed the very messages I was putting out. There is no selfless good deed but it doesn’t really matter, the world needs it all. I have been on both ends of kindness and decided this was the work of my life. When I looked back, kindness had been calling me all along.
My circle started to grow and so did my imagination of what a collective power of kindness could look like. I started to invite girlfriends and their kids on my missions of guerrilla goodness and write about all that happened. I discovered that lots of people wanted to offer something kind to the world and in turn themselves, but had no idea what or how to start. The more we practice the more we learn that none of it is really very complicated. All we have to do is offer the simple goodness we hold and watch as kindness changes everything.
Follow Patience online at Twitter, @kindnessgirl, or through her blog at www.kindnessgirl.com.
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This article first appeared in V Magazine for Women, print and digital editions for December 2009.
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