Random Acts

  It would be interesting, I think, to explore where the notion of "Random Acts of Kindness" came from. Yesterday, during my class on Gulliver's Travels, I explored the idea of a society where acts of virtue are rewarded as much as transgressions are punished. In a game that I created for the students, I had them rank in order of what was important, things they would like to see get rewarded with "extra marks" in school. Among one of the list items was "performing random acts of kindness." One of the students facetiously remarked that her concept of "random" would be something like giving a sandwich to a plant. The humor of this random act is that, of course, we wouldn't imagine doing something so random that it isn't beneficial to the other. In that sense, there isn't really such a thing as a "random act", since even kindness to strangers is predicated on the idea that it actually benefits those strangers in some way. For instance, I remember someone telling me that she decided to pay all her ex-boyfriend's phone bills. Had the boyfriend not had a phone or was a multimillionaire, perhaps this wouldn't have been an act she would have been motivated to do.
   The point of the "random acts" movement is not to reward unsuspecting recipients as much as it is to uplift or help the giver to stop attaching to specific people who are recipients. That is, a person often gives things with the idea of how they themselves will benefit from giving: for instance, through seeing the other person smile, or through a strengthened bond with that person. In giving randomly to strangers, the person learns to let go of self-attachment and to expand the view of who is worthy of her offering. Generally speaking, I would have to say that "random acts" aren't easy to do--and nor are they random after all. There is often some reason which is embedded in a spiritual tradition and a view of humanity which motivates such acts. For example, if I truly believe that everyone has their own separate predestined fate and individual karma, then the act of giving to the other, for no other reason than giving itself, might not make sense to me. If, on the other hand, I ascribe to the view that all beings can benefit from the merits of others and be uplifted by others' gifts, if not transformed by them, then my giving seems more meaningful and significant. Even when a person states that they are doing this giving "spontaneously", this is only because they have trained themselves in a certain way of seeing or being in the world, such as though a spiritual idea or practice.
    There are deeper reasons why we give which have a lot to do with how we are able to step into the shoes of others. But the point is that without a basic understanding of the importance and benefits of free gifts, it's easy to get caught up in a narrative where things are always given in exchange for other goods. I wonder if there are people in the world who are born and brought up believing that everything they have ever done in life had to be earned through their own efforts. I am sure that most people have been in situations where they simply couldn't pull themselves up (as in cases where we are ill), at which point they could see that nobody can possibly live only on their own efforts. From here, I suppose a person can develop a real gratitude.