The Clean and Green Club

Even a small kindness can make a huge difference if it’s received at the right time—in part because—like negative emotions—kindness is often contagious (p. 9). Also like negative emotions, we choose to be kind (pp. 39-40, 58).Sometimes, we benefit from kindnesses we don’t even know have been offered. A poet reported a very easy time going through a difficult surgery, only finding out later that the doctor, knowing her love of poetry, read Shakespeare to her while she was under anesthesia (p. 67). But let’s remember that kindness benefits the giver as well as the receiver, requires both (p. 70)—but, because kindness requires not just thoughts but action (p. 76), it often involves significant risk, as she shows in many examples throughout the book.

For Forrest, emerging from a childhood lined with multiple serial sexual abusers, kindness was a conscious choice: “Was my small, suspicious self the one I wanted to make decisions in my life? Did I want to live as if I were a victim waiting to happen? Or did I want to reach for something higher?…As we choose which deeds we will do, so we choose our identity, the ground on which we stand. We come to know ourselves in the same way others come to know us: by our deeds. This is why choosing to do kind deeds helps us develop a strong and healthy sense of self” (pp. 59, 60). Kindness is also empowering (pp. 83-84).

Still, she cautions, “Be careful about this. While an increased sense of self-worth is the result of being kind, it is a disastrous reason for being kind. Doing the right thing for a selfish reason is likely to backfire. We may find our offer of help thrown back in our faces. We can only control the intentions of our kindness, never the results.” (footnote, p. 61).

But doing the right thing for the right reasons can change your life, as it changed hers: “Acting as if I am being guided…has shown me how much of my experience depends on what I do with it…We can create a story about being thwarted or taken advantage of, or…being showered with gifts…Believing I am here for a purpose has made me discover that purpose and achieve it…I think our purpose is to be God’s designated driver. God doesn’t have hands…God depends on us” (p. 100).

That last paragraph is from Chapter 11. Chapter 12 exhorts us not only to be kind, but also to be kindness’s PR agents, spreading the idea that kindness works. She offers ten tools to spread kindness. And then she wraps up the book by describing kindness itself as a change agent: “the only way you change the world—is one heart at a time”—and, like kindness, change is contagious (p. 120). The very last page declares, “We deserve to see how our culture changes when kind people are in charge” of our news, entertainment, and especially our education (p. 122).