“In some ways, repeated acts of kindness are preferable to solitary, extraordinary and heroic acts of sacrifice.” – Malcolm Gladwell
It was almost exactly three years ago when I invited a family of strangers to come stay with me for an extended period of time. Here’s how it happened. A young woman attending the university near me was hit by a car while she was jogging. It threw her 30 feet onto a walking path and shattered much of the upper left side of her body – shoulder and neck, resulted in a brain injury and the need to fuse her spine to the base of her skull.
The young woman’s mother, Dawn, lived in Minneapolis and immediately flew out to be with her daughter. I’d never met Dawn but she was a friend of a friend and I’d heard she was sleeping first in the hospital room and then on the floor of her daughter’s room during the recovery so I invited her to use my guest bedroom anytime she needed a good night’s sleep.
Dawn came and then the injured young woman’s living situation got complicated, the young woman came to stay as well. Then the young woman’s boyfriend came for a few weeks when he had a break from school. And on some nights her brother who also lived in the area came to stay too.
They’d joke with me, “Who invites a family of people that they don’t know to come stay with them when they have a 4-month-old baby?” And I’d joke back – “To be fair, my son was only 2-months-old when I invited you.”
I recently heard a segment on kindness and sacrifice with Malcolm Gladwell on a Ten Percent Happier podcast that gave me a interesting perspective on why it was do-able to invite this family to live with me and maybe even why I did.
When Malcom Gladwell was in high school, his parents along with about eight others, sponsored three Vietnamese refugees to come live in Southern Ontario. Malcolm remembers this as a magical kind of experience so he went back to talk to those families about it and gather the stories. Here was his take:
“I was struck by how untraumatic the stories were. That nobody gave up their lives to bring in these people. Nobody took on an extra job to support them. No one. It was this kind of lots of people do small acts that added up to something big thing.”
Malcolm Gladwell on Ten Percent Happier
And that matched my experience. First of all, what I did was simple and small – it was just one single woman inviting another single woman to stay when she could. I didn’t invite a family of four strangers to stay with me for ten weeks – I worked up to that.
The second part was that it didn’t require any sacrifice for me. That is to say, Dawn and her kids were self-sufficient and supportive. My guest bedroom and the little nook on the top floor were not being used. More than that, Dawn would hold my baby on her lap every morning while she checked for email and I made breakfast and the whole family provided entertainment for Miss O who at four-years-old was undergoing a major transition of accepting a new brother into the house.
Then Gladwell noted that there was a hereditary component to what his parents had done. Both his mother and father had welcomed in strangers in their respective homes when they were kids and then when his mother went from Jamaica to school in England, she was welcomed in people’s houses. As Gladwell summarized:
“It was thing kind of practice that was being passed down from generation to generation. Not some kind of heroic thing but just what you do as a human being is you welcome strangers into your home. I see that kind of hereditary practice as being a powerful part of how kindness persists in the world. That you see it being modeled and it becomes part of your repertoire of behavior.”
Malcolm Gladwell on Ten Percent Happier
This resonated with me as well because when I was a senior in high school and my dad took a job as a pastor across the state, my best friend’s family invited me to live with them for the year and so I was the recipient of a similar act of kindness.
Gladwell also reflected on the necessity of kindness having to be do-able to be sustainable and spreadable. If we think we have to do huge things to be kind, it’s less likely to happen. Deb from the Closer to the Edge blog has often remarked that its little things that can make such a difference. And that’s how Malcolm Gladwell summarized it as well:
“In some ways, repeated acts of kindness are preferable to solitary, extraordinary and heroic acts of sacrifice.”
Dawn and her family are now an extended part of my family. Incredible people who touched our lives deeply. I got to experience that gift because it started small, it didn’t require sacrifice and was part of my history to welcome and be welcomed into other people’s homes. Apparently that is part of the formula for how kindness catches fire and spreads!
What’s your experience with acts of kindness?
(featured photo is the pile of shoes that would accumulate at my door when I had these guests and it came to symbolize when my house and my heart was full)
Surprised By Joy 