Friday, June 18, 2010

The Kindness of Strangers

Sometimes the world is a hard place to live in. Things aren't great economically, the weather rarely cooperates, people drive like maniacs, and so often (in Ireland anyway) people will plow into you in a store without so much as a glance, knocking you over because they're in a great rush to get past you and you're not important enough to acknowledge as a human being.

It's easy to list the bad things, and the hard things, and the negative things. I know this to be true because I've done it many a time myself. A few days ago was one of those days. Nothing seemed to be going right, and except for the fact that I'm in one of the most beautiful places in the world, I'd have been thoroughly miserable. And then, Mental Floss saved the day.

If you click HERE, you'll be taken to a short article followed by about 200 comments, all about the kindness of strangers and the goodness of people. I cried all of my eye makeup off reading through the comment section, and I felt much better about my life and about humanity in general.

There is so much good in the world if you're willing to look for it!

1 comment:

AubreyMo said...

It's true - it's like they say, if you look for the negative that's what you'll find, and the same for goodness (although sometimes it's dang hard to look for the good and ignore the bad).

Sometimes when I have a pity party I'll drag myself out of the house and just try to do one thing for someone else that will make them happy. Even if it's just uploading a picture that they'll like, or surprising them with dinner...that generally gets me out of that mood. Or I'll try to focus "smaller". Instead of looking at the big, scary picture of life, I'll look at one flower. What color is it? Is it blooming? And I'll look it over until I forget about my bad day.