Starting at Page One

Let’s start at the very beginning.  A very good place to start.  Actually, I’m starting with page six but it is the first challenge.  DO SOMETHING NICE FOR SOMEONE BUT DON’T TELL THEM YOU DID IT.  Hmm, okay.  Seems simple at first, and if you don’t want to get too cutesy about it, it really is simple.  The point, as I explained yesterday to my kids, Andrew and Rachel, is that you don’t want someone to know “who” did something nice.  So, paying for the person behind you in the drive-thru is out.  Although, that is a nice thing to do.  Go ahead and do that if you want.  I’ve been the recipient of that a couple of times…mostly at Dunkin Donuts.  Not sure why that is, maybe because odds are it won’t be a large tab?  Or are people who drink Dunkin just a generous lot?  You’ll have to take my word that it’s not just because I go through the drive-thru at Dunkin Donuts all the time…I don’t.  We did have that happen to us once at McDonald’s.  Although we initially ruined the joy for ourselves because after being excited to receive such an unexpected gift, we blamed the folks for us getting the wrong order.  Nope, before the days of all day breakfast at McDonald’s, breakfast magically transitioned to lunch at 10:30am.  That’s how you end up with Crispy Chicken Club instead of a sausage biscuit. Not the fault of the generous person in front of you or the person working the window.  I’ve paid for people behind me before but I usually don’t think about it until someone pays for me and then I just pass it on.  That still counts but the credit really goes to the person who started the chain.

Back to the challenge.  As we discussed this, we identified a couple of things you could do.  Since I work at a library, I could pay someone’s late fines.  That’s a nice thing to do but you don’t really want library staff digging around looking into people’s accounts to see who owes what, so that’s out.  You could drag someone else’s trash can back from the curb but that seems a little too easy.  I think for that to count you’d need to do that multiple times and then you’d feel bad if you stopped.  It would almost be like adding another chore to your own list.  Plus, that might confuse people and make them think you were shaming them, as if they are somehow not putting their cans up in a timely manner.  Who knew the mental minefields of secretly being nice to people?  We finally settled on a sort of a secret Santa plan, without the Santa part.

I had several $5 Target gift cards that I purchased earlier this year and didn’t use.  I guess that could be another blog post in itself, but I won’t bore you.  This week, each of us will find a way to give these gift cards to someone without their knowledge.  We determined the only rules are that you can’t use it for yourself and you must try to get it to someone without them knowing it came from you.  

What about you?  Are you up for this feel-good challenge?  You certainly don’t have to spend any money to do something nice for someone.  If you decide to participate please let me know.  I’d love to hear what anonymously nice thing you did for someone.  I’ll be back at the end of the week to report how we deployed our gift cards and hopefully we’ll be able to check this off as a challenge completed.  Don’t keep this challenge to yourself. Challenge your friends to participate, too.  We can start of movement of thinking about others instead of ourselves…okay, probably not, but we will make someone’s day and we’ll feel better in the process.  Thanks for reading!  You in?

Before you go…the first two lines of the blog are from the Do-Re-Mi song in the Sound of Music.  Just didn’t want you to have to Google it…and now you’ll be singing it all day!