Kindness: You Can't Always See the Ripples

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." - Aesop

This quote of the week essay is brought to you by an experience I had at Chuckee Cheese over winter break. My cousins were in town en route to skiing at Wisconsin Dells and we met for lunch and a crazy hour (so much pressure when your card is timed and not on points) of scraping up every ticket possible. I found a game that I was really good at and at the end of the hour I was dripping sweat from enthusiasm and running out of pockets to stash tickets.

I got done with the hour and felt a little guilty for being so ticket-hungry and monopolizing the lock opening game and when I looked at the prizes and realized they weren’t (shockingly enough) geared towards teenagers. A lot of work in vain. So I thought, I’ve got five little kids here with me - what can I do for them with my tickets?

Enter the giant Chuckee Cheese lollipops. I had enough for six (I want to know who prices these things!) and so I bought one for each of my cousins and siblings and one for myself without much thought. I was so excited to see their reactions and their smiles and I passed them out super happy. Five minutes later Addison opens his and starts having a few licks.

“Is it good?” asks his excited older cousin.

He makes a face. “No, it’s disgusting.”

I’m incredulous. How dare he? I tore my open wrapper open and took a giant lick as if to prove my point. Immediately my face puckered up. Nasty.

I was disappointed because there were a lot of things one can do with the number of tickets I had - I could have given them to a family with younger kids or something along those lines. Instead of wasted on ungrateful (or so I thought) children and they weren’t even tasty enough to eat. I was actually a little bit irritated by the whole thing.

Moments later, after we finished lunch and my mom was talking with my aunt and uncle - I was scrolling through my Pinterest feed, wondering if we would ever leave. My cousins were walking around and having a grand old time and eventually, I got curious and went to go investigate. I found Addison and asked him (or maybe he just told me) what was going on. Smile on his face and tons of energy he told me: “We’re collecting left behind tickets on the machines to give to someone else.”

I was like: “That’s awesome!” And I immediately joined the hunt. We didn’t amass anything significant AT ALL, not many people leave their tickets behind - but we gathered some, put them on a receipt and gave them to a mother with a little girl, maybe five, and it made them both grin from ear to ear. Kindness is a rippling force, and even though you don’t usually get to see those ripples, today I did.

The fact is that the smallest and most insignificant person in the world has a tremendous amount of sway on the world just by how they treat others. We all have emotions and sometimes we let them have too much sway over how we act. But if we choose to be kind, no matter who we are, that rubs off on people and it spreads. A person I hardly knew gave me a bag of gummy worms for Christmas - like he actually went to the store and bought them for me and it was super cool. I was positively influenced into kindness by that. When someone at school is being a total grouch to everyone, I feel that and it usually comes out in my own treatings of other people.

Maybe you get tired of hearing about the force of kindness. But it’s not just a new age teaching to try to make a world that can never be happy be filled with sunshine and unicorns. Are you going to change the whole world? Probably not, but there are ripples - you may not see them, but they are there - for even the smallest and most insignificant acts of kindness. There’s not an effect anywhere in the world more disproportionate to its cause than the happiness felt by the receiver of an act of kindness. It doesn’t have to be a lot, it doesn’t even have to be intentionally thought about beforehand. It’s just doing stuff for other people. It has three positive influences right away. The first is yourself - there’s so much joy from helping and loving other people. Second, the person you have shown kindness to will be filled with joy. Third, almost ubiquitously, the person that has been shown kindness will impact someone else with their actions. There’s NO such thing as a wasted act of kindness and I want us all to be a people who are described as kind.