Spreading joy: Goodness really is its own reward
Sarah Ebner looks at how small acts of kindness are playing bigger role in society.
Not long after the onset of the pandemic, author Clare Mackintosh carried out an act of kindness for her community in a small town in North Wales. She established a “secret library,” a box filled with books for locals to borrow.
“Once the libraries closed, people came here and, two days after lockdown, almost all the books were gone,” Mackintosh says.
A principal added a children's section, and the small library became a local landmark.
What started from a simple act of thinking about others grew into something bigger.
“The kindness in my small, rural community over the last few months has been extraordinary,” Mackintosh says. “The secret library became a depository for vegetable seeds, food bank contributions, fabric for masks and hospital scrubs. A local crafter made simple sewing kits and left them in the library to help alleviate boredom, along with a stack of homemade bookmarks
and a cheery note saying: `Help yourself.'
“It brings me great joy to tidy the library each morning and spot which titles have changed; to know that someone has visited and chosen a book, perhaps left two or three for someone else to discover.”
Over recent months acts of kindness like this have been replicated around the world.
“I think there's a movement happening,” says Jaclyn Lindsey, the co-founder of Kindness.org,
which commissions research into altruism and promotes kindness initiatives. “COVID-19 has given an opportunity for people to demonstrate new ways of being kind.”
These have included anything from setting up community groups to shopping for the vulnerable to making food for the elderly. I write The Telegraph's Good News newsletter and have been inundated with uplifting stories — from an eight-year-old who is mowing his elderly neighbours' lawns for free, to a group of Syrian refugees who have been cooking food for workers at their local hospital.
What fascinates me is how so many people say that being kind has helped them as much as those they have helped.
That does not surprise Oliver Scott Curry, research director for Kindlab (the research arm of Kindness.org), and a research affiliate at the School of Anthropology at Oxford University. He says that being kind can be “mutually beneficial,” and carried out research that concluded it improved well-being.
“All the evidence suggests that it makes you happy,” Curry explains, as it “can make you feel that you're part of a support network, or less isolated.”
“You might feel you're part of something larger than yourself, or it might help you make friends or earn the admiration of peers. Other people might think you're a nice person and then choose to interact with you.”