Kindness: The Little Thing that Matters Most. Jaime Thurston

Kindness is the glue that holds society together. It is the essence of beauty. It brings smiles to faces, lightens our burdens, creates friendships, transforms people and situations. It can make a day memorable. It can be the answer to someone’s prayers. This is how I see Jaime Thurston’s work with 52 Lives. It is heart-warming to see how she makes a difference in so many people’s lives.

And I mean heart-warming in two ways. First, in the sense that it makes us feel uplifted and inspired. Second, in that observing or learning about kindness does create a warming sensation in the heart. Kindness produces oxytocin and nitric oxide, two substances that directly affect our arteries, softening them, dilating them, reducing blood pressure, clearing them of free radicals, and increasing blood flow to the heart.

It’s part of what social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, calls ‘elevation’, which we feel when we’re being kind, receiving kindness, or witnessing kindness. This also inspires us to pay kindnesses forward. This in turn sets in motion the well-known ripple effect of kindness, where one act touches many more lives than just the original recipient.

We are wired to be kind. It’s our deepest nature. We have kindness genes that are some of the oldest in the human genome, at over 500 million years young. Looking out for each other is human nature.

I hope this book warms you and may your kindnesses in turn warm the hearts of many others. Of the different talked-about ways of changing the world for the better, I believe that kindness carries our best hope.

Introduction

‘Urgently needed – rugs.’ That was the message that started everything. I was searching online for second-hand furniture, when I came across the plea for help. It was a Wanted ad placed by a woman who sounded desperate. I emailed her and was heartbroken by what I learned. She needed the rugs to cover her broken floor so her young children wouldn’t cut their feet. She was a single mum who had fled a horrifying domestic situation and was starting all over again with nothing. I wanted to help her, and I was sure that if others knew about her, they would want to help, too. So I spread the word among my friends and family, and household goods soon started pouring in.

I delivered everything to her one afternoon – piles of bedding, furniture, kitchenware, clothing, toys and some gift vouchers. I will never forget the look on her face when she opened the door. She was in complete shock that people she didn’t even know would be willing to help her. This was a woman very much in need of kindness, and strangers helped her feel loved when she needed it the most.

I wanted to do more … I wanted to do this every week. And so 52 Lives was born. It started life as a simple Facebook page I set up so my friends and family could help people, but over the weeks, months and years, it grew into a global community of people who wanted to spread kindness and help others.

Each week, we choose someone, somewhere in the world, in need of help, share their story on our website and social media pages, request what they need, and our supporters offer help. It’s based on the premise that people are good and want to help one another – and that lots of good people working together can achieve amazing things.

52 Lives helps anyone, from anywhere, with anything; our only criterion is that the person is in need of kindness. In the few years since 52 Lives began, we have changed people’s lives in such a wonderful variety of ways – from buying teeth for a man in Alabama to building a sensory shed for a toddler in south London who was losing her sight, making video messages for a young boy being bullied, supplying wheelchairs to children in China and the UK, and sending a little girl and her grandmother

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