I wasn’t even aware that this day existed. Today is National Do Something Nice Day. I happened to find out about this fabulous holiday while I was checking my email. It was sitting there in my news feed: ”October 5th is Do Something Nice Day. What is the nicest thing someone has ever done for you?”
There it is. The pressure to do some epic nice thing for someone that they will always remember. Are you going to give someone a car? Pay for a year of their child’s higher education? Anonymously make a mortgage payment for a struggling friend? All awesome stuff, and I would welcome any of these nice gestures in a heartbeat. But nice doesn’t have to be epic. It doesn’t even have to be all that noticeable. Nice should be a way of life that is automatic. It is a universal language that everyone can understand.
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I think that today should be the beginning of Do Something Nice Year. Today should be the springboard for us as human beings to stop and think about being nice ALL OF THE TIME. It isn’t hard, it feels great, and it makes other people happy.
So what is nice? It is simply being a person who performs acts of kindness toward other living things. It is being pleasant. It is not being an asshole about things. It is being someone other people want to be around. Nice is doing things like:
- holding the door for someone carrying a heavy load
- letting another car into the lane of traffic during rush hour
- stopping the elevator doors for the woman who is running toward it
- writing a nice note to your spouse and leaving it for him or her to find in the morning (thanks, honey!)
- surprising your kids with a trip to the playground before homework is done
- not telling the rude lady at Starbucks exactly where she should shove her silo of coffee
The best thing about all this is it is free. It costs nothing to be nice, and it actually feels good to walk around doing good deeds for your fellow man. So today, forget epic displays of nice. The world doesn’t need one single day of monumental nice acts. Forget your asshole ways because the world DEFINITELY doesn’t need that. What we all need are days upon days of subtle niceties that almost go unnoticed but will make the world a better place. In the words Bill S. Preston, Esq., I leave you with this: “Be excellent to each other.”
~Sunshine ☼
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