Gratitude for the kindness of strangers
Our theme this week is ‘moral beauty and the kindness of strangers’. I’d like to share with you a story that I shared at the Goodness Collective on Monday.
Last year, some friends gave us a new tumble drier that they didn’t use. Six (very wet) months later, we hadn’t used the tumble drier either. So, we decided to put it on the Hastings Give and Takery – a Facebook page where people can give items away for free.
Almost immediately, someone asked if they could come and collect it. We exchanged details and they arrived soon after in their car….a car which very clearly was not going to be able to house this tumble drier. To add to this dilemma, the street where we live has very limited parking, which meant that the collector had stopped in the road whilst we battled in vain to try and make the tumble drier fit into the car. I could feel myself getting nervous that we were blocking the road as sometimes people can be pretty impatient about this kind of thing.
A guy in a van drove towards us and pulled up and I thought ‘oh no, here we go…’. He sat there for a minute watching us trying to wrestle with reality, and then wound down the window and said, ‘this is going to sound really weird, but where are you trying to get that to? If you give me a hand unloading this stuff from the van, I’ll load the tumble drier into the van and bring it round to your place’.
Honestly, it was such a brilliant moment, my faith in humanity was restored with that one kind gesture. He could have been a d!ck about it, but he was kind and generous instead.
I think it’s so easy these days to think that kindness is in short supply and I was really struck by how happy and thankful I felt having witnessed this example of, what Dacher Keltner might call, ‘moral beauty’.
Dacher Keltner is a psychologist and researcher who studies the field of awe. He and his team out forward the idea that we can find awe in the every day, not just life-changing moments. He identifies eight wonders of life – everyday opportunities for us to experience awe, and moral beauty is one of these eight wonders. He describes it as ‘goodness, virtue, or courage’.
If you’re interested in this subject then you might be delighted to learn that in August (or Awegust as I call it), we will be dedicating the whole month to accessing awe through these eight wonders of life 🙂
So, this week, my thanks go out to kind strangers everywhere.
A thank you letter I saw tied to a tree a few years back – I felt so moved at the amount of gratitude surrounding this lost-and-found necklace and how it had momentarily united these strangers.
The care and time someone has put into painting this pebble, leaving it tucked away for someone to find is, I think, another example of the kindness of strangers.
self reflection prompts
Can you recall a time where you’ve witnessed the kindness of strangers?
What about a time when you’ve been on the receiving end of a stranger’s kindness?
Think back to a time that you’ve shown kindness to a stranger – How did it make you feel inside?
When you think of the concept of moral beauty, who springs to mind as being a shining example of that?
Bring to mind an example of kindness that you feel thankful for. Take a few minutes to write about what it meant to you, how it made you feel, and how it inspired or affected your own actions.
