Conscious Acts of Kindness

There are a lot of ways to interact with the world, and more and more people are learning how to respond with conscious acts rather than reacting on pure adrenaline. When someone cuts you off in traffic or bumps you with their shopping cart in the grocery store, it can cause an adrenaline reaction. Adrenaline is a good thing when you're in a situation where you need to be on high alert, such as in survival situations. You need the "fight-or-flight" rush you get from adrenaline to get you out of imminent danger. However, most of us are not living in basic survival mode, so when we are faced with a situation in our lives where we get an adrenaline rush, we are not sure what to do with it. We feel as though we have been handed an either/or situation in which neither feels like the appropriate response. Neither fight nor flight feels like the right thing to do in the given situation. In the article that follows, we are told about a third response, which is not a reaction, but rather a carefully considered response, which stops negative energy in its tracks and initiates instead a chain of positive, conscious actions.

You may have already heard the story about the guy in the Starbucks drive-thru who paid for the order placed by the car behind him, which in turn created a chain reaction of cars paying for the car behind them. This happened originally during the holiday season in 2007. I remember hearing about it, although I didn't get too many details at that time. If you click on the link below, you will not only get the whole story, but a video of the news report that was aired at the time. This isn't exactly news in the sense of it just having happened, but this is the first time I've encountered this article, which was published three months ago. The article was sent to me by Ginny Hardie in Olympia, Washington. I'm glad to be able to hear the rest of the story and to share it with the readers of AGNADL.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-rosenfeld/pay-it-backwards-an-act-o_b_151793.html

Editor of AGNADL