Tip 31: Have you joined the Karma Army?

Kindness can become its own motive.
We are made kind by being kind.
Eric Hoffer

In 2002 humourist Danny Wallace placed an ad in a London magazine. The ad said, quite simply, ‘JOIN ME’. To his amazement, hundreds of people responded, even though the ad gave no details at all about what they would be joining, or why. This, in itself, says shed-loads about our need for community and our need to belong to something… but I digress.

Having got such a great response, Wallace then needed to decide what exactly his respondents were joining. His solution was to encourage all his Joinees (his Karma Army as he called them) to undertake Random Acts of Kindness at least once a week. The only instructions were that you had to be nice to someone else for absolutely no personal gain.

Doing nice things for other people has even more impact when it’s completely unexpected: paying for the cup of tea that the person in the queue in front of you has just ordered … offering to carry someone’s shopping for them … sending a friend a card to let them know you’re thinking of them … or even simply holding a door open for someone.

Since then many thousands of people from all over the world have joined the cause. Wallace says “If what goes around really does come around, we all stand to benefit from these Random Acts of Kindness.”

Small acts of kindness for no personal gain — what a great idea. It’s good to feel that a single considerate act has the potential to multiply many times over, and there’s no knowing where that could lead.

As the Tibetan Buddhist monk Patrul Rinpoche put it so well:

Do not take lightly small good deeds,
believing they can hardly help.
For drops of water, one by one,
in time can fill a giant pot.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina
or softened the fiber of a free people.
A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

One who knows how to show and to accept kindness will be
a friend better than any possession.
Sophocles

Give nobody’s heart pain so long as thou canst avoid it,
for one sigh may set a whole world into a flame.
Sa’di