A Gift of Kindness

The story goes like this:

There was once a teacher who instructed each student to write their name in the middle of a piece a sheet of cardstock. The class was then instructed to get up from their chairs, leave their cardstock at their desk, and travel from desk to desk. On each of their classmate’s cardstock papers, they were asked to write something nice about each classmate — a compliment or a brief note of praise.

The story picks up a few years later. The setting is now at a military funeral. One of the classmates had been killed in action, and laying beside his uniformed chest was his piece of cardstock from that classroom assignment; you could tell that it had been folded and unfolded and refolded over the last few years.

What comfort those notes of kindness written on a piece of cardstock must have been to this young soldier.

“They found it in his pocket,” the mother told his friends. “It obviously meant the world to him,” and as she spoke, the mother watched as his classmates reached inside their wallets; they had kept their cards with them. Some looked as crisp as the day they were created. Others looked more worn than the one inside the casket.

After hearing the story, as has been tradition for the past 20 years in this classroom, this year’s English 11 class then chose their own color of cardstock, wrote their names on each card, and replicated the activity.

A simple act of kindness can actually change someone’s day and can even change their life. Sure, there are health benefits that kindness makes — decreased blood pressure and cortisol levels and increased serotonin and dopamine, but there’s much more than that. Kindness is a good kind of contagious. It connects us with others. It decreases our anxiety. It reduces our stress.

Simply said, in a world where the word “contagious” can often be frightening, contagious kindness can be a blessing. For the English classes this past week — let’s even call it a “gift.”