The Neighbours

"Goodmorning, ma'am. Are you OK with me offering you a bouquet of flowers?' I overheard my next door neighbour ask my upstairs neigbour. After a short silence he explained: 'Someone gave me this beautiful bouquet, but I'm going to be on a trip for over a week, so I would like you to have it. Would you mind if I gave it to you? ' My upstairs neighbour shrugged. 'Sure. OK.' And that was it.

This is only the fifth blog entry and this afternoon I already found myself thinking: 'O dear, what have I started.' Not the being friendly part, but the blogging part. What if what happened to my neighbour happened to me? Am I even the right person to write about kindness? I am very demanding, and expect people to be enthusiastic when I'm nice. I'd sulk or get impatient if they weren't. Had I been my next door neighbour I'd be moping how I'd better have asked someone else, someone who actually appreciated this very nice gesture of mine. Someone who saw the value of neighbourliness etc. etc. Would I still feel like writing about kindness to strangers if I got reactions like this time after time?

Luckily I know myself pretty well so I saw this 'what have I started' phase coming from a mile away, so yesterday I wrote down a list of topics I could touch. I read a lot about random acts of kindness last weekend and was pretty surprised about how many lights are shed on this topic. I raised an eyebrow when I read it is actually a trend, because what that really means is that being kind is now trendy in the marketing world. I found a lot of touching stories of people online and some blog entries and articles with tips and summaries of the benefits of being kind.

So, here I'll tell myself to get on with it, already.