I received some money for my birthday at the beginning of this year, and instead of going out and spending it on myself, I decided that I wanted to use it to do random nice things for other people. I came up with this ‘bee nice’ idea when I was at the drive-thru one morning, waiting for my coffee. I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to just pay the bill for the person behind me?’ I wondered if I did something randomly nice for them, if they in turn would do something randomly nice for someone else that day, and if the chain of nice acts would continue on and on.
Over the next few days, I came up with the idea that with each nice act that I did for someone, I would anonymously leave them a little note asking that they, in turn, do something anonymously nice for someone else. That’s when I decided to design a little card that could be passed along from person to person. I sent the design off to the printer, and the bee nice card was born!
I decided that I could potentially track a bunch of these random acts of kindness on this blog, by having people come here to anonymously post about what nice things were done for them, or what nice things they did for someone else.
At first, I thought that I would just start this whole experiment locally. Then I had another idea. I decided that I would look up 50 random addresses across the country (one from each state) and mail them each a $2.00 gift card just to brighten their day. I used Google maps to find out what stores were nearby these 50 households. I quickly noticed that there are a whole lot of Panera Bread locations across this country! There are also lots of Dunkin’ Donuts. Then there are some locations that don’t seem to have anything nearby.
So that’s going to be my first random act of kindness. I’ve ordered up gift cards from Panera Bread, Dunkin’ Donuts and Amazon.com. Once they come in, I’ll mail them out and hopefully I’ll get some responses from the recipients. I know that $2.00 isn’t a lot of money these days, but hopefully these people can enjoy a nice cup of coffee, or some sort of treat on my dime. (I’m not wealthy by any means, so I had to work within the budget of the birthday money that I received.)
I am not asking anyone to disclose any information about themselves on this site, other than perhaps where in the country they are located, so that we can see where all the bee nice cards are traveling to. I will post again once I’ve dropped the first bee nice cards in the mail!
