Today I submitted a post for the Kindness Blog. I have been doing a lot of looking back at our year of the project and it prompted me to write a little about our story for a blog that draws more readers. Now, I have no way of knowing if they will use what I wrote, so I am posting it here as well. There are some insights into our project here that my followers might not know. The resistance we have overcome to continue sharing our smiles!
A Year In the Life of a Kindness Project….
A few days ago I looked at an alert on my smartphone, it showed me what I had posted on social media one year ago that day, and it reminded me of the beginning of what has been a long and rewarding journey into the world of kindness. The first post read:
"I think I am going to start a project. I just want to touch the lives of random people in a positive way. Put a little light into the world. *ponders*"
This small post started a flurry of discussion among my Facebook friends, and even some very unexpected responses.
At first, I received responses from friends and family who were helping me craft the idea that would eventually become the Somewhere Out There Project. We went back and forth about it all day long. I posted that I wanted it to involve something tangible, as I felt the world had become so ‘digital’. It was by far one of the most interesting and prolonged conversations I had ever had on Facebook. Eventually we settled on small wooden tokens that I would burn positive messages into and leave in random places for people to find. I nicknamed the tokens ‘smiles’. But not everyone was smiling….
Enter my fiancés brother. Now my fiancé and I had been together for a couple of years at this point. I had met his family only a handful of times at holiday events. The family wasn’t very close, in stark contrast to my own family were holidays were filled with more people than you could fit into the house. They seemed nice enough folk to me, but I am also the optimistic type. I somehow seemed to think that everyone is kind and selfishness was not a real thing. In my head it was a logical conclusion of life to strive to be kind to others. I learned very quickly that this is not the reality of our world today.
Amidst the support and ideas and excitement generated by this conversation, my fiancés brother started posting about it. The extent to which he eventually went to tear down the concept of this project baffles me to this day. At first it was just your normal, ‘that’s a dumb idea’ comments. Eventually, though he turned it into vitriol. He ranted about how I shouldn’t be worrying about other people. How I should care only about myself and my own family. He eventually even started posted things on his main Facebook wall about how people waste their time on being kind to others. He was very upset about the whole thing in a way that my mind simply could not fathom. In my opinion, even if he was so selfish as to not want to be kind to others, why did he care so much that I did?
The whole scenario, which went on for a while as I persevered through the beginning of the project, altered my view of the world. It may sound silly that something so small would create such a huge issue but he was sending texts to us just condemning us as idiots for caring at all about the world at large. Personally, I was appalled that this type of attitude even existed. I had never met a person so negative in my life. It was, in some ways, hard for me to get past. I just couldn’t comprehend why it mattered so much to him and how he could be that unbelievably selfish.
Eventually, we just moved forward with the project. With so much support from my other friends and families for the concept I went into it with all my heart. As I researched and learn more about kindness projects and initiatives I was both saddened by the fact that this selfishness I had found in someone in my own life happened often in our world but at the same time I was excited about all the people who were out there doing their own kindness projects on a daily basis.
After a successful Kickstarter campaign the project was born. One year later as I continue to craft the ‘smile’ tokens that have now reached multiple continents, countries, and states, I can’t help but smile myself because I have shown the world that somewhere out there, someone cares.
Stephanie Lassen
Somewhere Out There Project Creator
www.somewhereoutthereproject.com
@smileSOTproject