Acts of kindness. A lot has been said about mental health issues of late. We tend to think it might just be the tip of the iceberg.
No exception for me. While it's çool to say we all want to be ‘healing' like the trend now, it's also good to reflect on why we are in this situation now.
The fast-paced environment and the boost for social media might be to blame. This holds especially for Gen Z who are born with the device in their faces. My 1-year-old nephew did not even blink and even smiled when I wanted to take a photo of him. Can you imagine that?
So I started thinking that I should start this #PayItForward trend when I came across my book recently.
In any religion there’s always this Pay It Forward concept, hence if anyone can remember the movie by Mimi Leder and act by Kevin Spacey & Haley Joel Osment about a young boy who tries to make the world a better place by doing acts of kindness. Why do people do this? It's because after doing such good things we feel good about ourselves. The world doesn't revolve around just us. People fight every struggle that we don't know of. So, please don't judge.
Instead, what I know we should start doing is at least to do this Pay It Forward exercise. Like maybe pay an extra RM2.50 for a teh tarik at the mamak, or pay for toll fare for the car behind us. Maybe even wind down your window and just smile and compliment a random stranger by saying "Hey! You look awesome today''.
I like to think is as that helping someone and getting a smile from them will make me happy. At least fulfilled in a way. I can't really explain it, maybe my love language is an act of service so doing that gives me a sense of euphoria in a way.
With this, I urge Malaysians to once again restore the humanity that we once knew.
Few years ago at my condominium unit, my friend and I started an exchange book corner. How this works is that you can take a book from the shelves but you need to give another book.
It started out slow like most new things in life, especially with the Management Office Personnel asking what sort of materials am I putting up and so on. It started picking up fast during the Pandemic when most people are stuck in their houses and getting bored with their cable TVs and constant COVID-19 statistics. Before we knew it the shelves started giving in to the weight and the management decided to replace them with two larger shelves. To date, there are even books in Persian language, Malay books, and books on Hajj.
I feel that sometimes the good stuff can indeed be free.
RJ Eszura is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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