Random Acts of Kindness

A random act of kindness is doing something kind for someone, for no reason other than: you can, so why not? This is an idea or concept that I have always grown up with and do all the time, that I credit to my father, Hendrik Vrey.

My father is a popular local wildlife artist and a devout Christian. Growing up with an artist, our lives were always up and down. Sometimes he made a lot of sales, sometimes he did not. Sometimes life was tight, and we cut down on what food we bought, and sometimes we went on holiday abroad. Even in lean times, we still always had food to eat and a roof over our heads, we always had more than we actually needed.
As a devout Christian, my father always believed that God takes care of him and that he will always have what he needs, according to Gods will. If he maintains his faith and lives his life for the good of all mankind, as the bible teaches him, he will always have God’s blessing. According to this belief, my father also believed that he should always be charitable when he can, and he showed me this by always doing random acts of kindness and helping those less fortunate than himself.

I remember once during a market at which we exhibited, he had made a big cash sale, and went to toilet with a pocket full of N$200 notes. At the toilet he decided to give the cleaning lady who had been cleaning the bathrooms, one of the notes in his pocket, to say thank you for always keeping the toilets clean during the exhibition. She was shocked and delighted and whole heartedly exclaimed “Dankie Pappie!!!!!”(It means 'Thank you Father' and calling people mother and father is common in Namibian cultures). Her reaction and joy made him reach into his pocket again, taking out and handing her another note. She put her hands to her heart with shock and awe and again, even louder and more sincerely than before “Daaaankie Paaaaappie!!!!”. He reached into his pocket and handed her another note, and tears filled her eyes as she shouted “DANKIE PAPPIE!!!!” and continued shouting and falling to her knees as he reached in his pocket again and again, handing her notes.
I asked him later why he gave her so much, and he said that he was really happy about his sale and he wanted to share his joy with someone. His heart told him that he should share it with her in the way that he did. We talked about it, and we recognised that she had probably been praying for some kind of help, and my father’s kind action likely seemed like the miracle that she had been praying for. My father could be the tool through which a prayer was answered.

When he exhibited abroad in the US and Canada, he also raised funds and awareness for an HIV orphanage here in my city, which later saw the city award him with the title of Peace Ambassador. My whole life, I have always seen him try to help and be kind and give whenever he saw an opportunity to. When his friend asked to borrow money because he was in need, my father just gave the money if he was capable at the time.

In the same way, I have seen him getting his prayers answered when he needed it, time and time again. For example, when school fees needed to be paid and a random client, the first in a long time, comes and buys art for the exact amount of money that he needed to pay the bill.
He always had everything he really needed. Opportunities that guided him around the world, presented themselves to him, as he needed it.

During 2020 his faith was put to the test. As covid 19 swept across the world, the tourists, and so our clientele and our income, left back to their home countries for lockdown. I really value that time, because it showed my family actually how little we needed. It showed me all the things we really didn’t need to waste resources on and everything we took for granted. This time was hard on my father though, it threw him into a deep depression, and I remember catching him sitting behind his workshop, just crying away in utter misery and fear of the future. I remember trying to remind him that for now we still had enough and, in the future, if we need more, we will have more... But for that moment, we have more than enough food and we had warm beds and we had each other. I reminded him that no bad situation lasts forever, and to have faith in his beliefs and his God, like he always had.

We made it through that time, but that is not what this story is about.... As I have always been a giver, I would like to highlight that I am also the receiver of amazing miracles and kindnesses all the time. In 2020 I was the receiver of a random act of kindness, that may well have saved my life. I believe that I receive, because I always give when I can. You see, in 2020 when I was at one of the darkest moments in my life contemplating my end, a friend reached out to me and offered me a free meditation workshop. It was through this act of kindness that I discovered myself, given at a time when I needed to understand my purpose and needed to learn to love not only those around me, but also myself. Probably mostly myself. I asked him how I could ever repay him, and he told me to pay it forward to three other people instead.

“Pay it forward” by Catherine Ryan Hyde, is a book that was on my grade 7 reading list. I knew the story well and it had even been adapted into a movie. The idea was that a single person could change the world through random acts of kindness, if they ask everyone to pay the kindness forward to three other people, and then ask those, in turn to pay the kindness forward to three other people etc. The ripple effect of kindness extends outwards and onwards at an exponential rate. Since then, I have paid it forward to many more than just three and I will keep paying it forward every time my heart speaks to me.

I was already a fan of random acts of kindness before Morne’ asked me to pay it forward. Unlike my father, I was not devoutly religious, so God was not my purpose, but instead I believed in my own sets of quotes and philosophies, taken from here and there – “You reap what you sow”, “You get what you give”, ”Hermetic principles”, “The universal laws”, etc. I believe in the humanist idea that it shouldn’t matter whether there is or isn’t a God. Whether heaven or hell was real. Who is right or who is wrong, whose prophet is real and whose isn’t. People should always work and strive to be the best that they can be, regardless of beliefs or motivation. Because you can. Because you are a part of a bigger thing and you are a part of Earth, without which you cannot live. Basically, my beliefs are very fluid, and change shape as I grow and learn and experience more in life, and they are already different now than they were then.

But let me get back to a belief that I mentioned earlier that I follow because it just makes sense to me and explains why both my father and I experience seemingly miraculous experiences – The universal laws.
As I understand things, The 12 Universal Laws are an extension of the 7 Hermetic Principles. I might write about all of that in the future, but for now I just want to highlight the Principle of Vibration and how I understand its extension into the Law of Attraction.

The Principle of Vibration is that everything is always in motion. At an atomic level, even a diamond is vibrating and in motion. If everything is always in motion and everything is always vibrating at an atomic level, then everything has frequency; and frequency happens in waves. Many analogue watches keep time because of the frequency of a quartz crystal inside it – so everything is always at the very least vibrating and even a rock has a frequency, and so do you.

If anyone knows anything about waves and frequencies, please correct me if I am wrong, this is only my layman’s understanding... But from what I understand, when a wave meets another wave, there is wave interference. If the wave is moving exactly opposite to the wave it meets, they will cancel each other out and the height of the wave will flatten and the frequency decreases, which is called destructive interference. If the wave is moving at the same frequency as the wave it meets, it will create a constructive interference, which means they will resonate higher together than they did alone before. This seems pretty straightforward to me. Here is a picture and a youtube vid to explain wave interference from Arbor Scientific - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBuW385IT38

If I apply these ideas of frequency waves and wave interference to the frequency that I emit, that would mean that things and people that emit a similar frequency to me will resonate – we will emit an even higher frequency together and I will attract them to me, and when things or people emit an opposite frequency to me, we will cancel out each other's vibration. Although I recognise that all these laws and principles are closely intertwined, and all affect each other - I this idea illustrates my interpretation of how the law of attraction works.

What it all boils down to, in my opinion, is that your thoughts, intentions, emotions, words and actions all have frequency, and all come together to form the frequency that you emit, which directly influences which frequencies resonate with you and which don’t. What you attract and what you repel in your life. Which things create destructive wave interference and which things create constructive wave interference. What you put out is what you get back. I believe this can apply to every layer of life, and it is also something that you can consciously and effectively change and adjust in yourself once you become aware of it.

So, for example – If you get paid and you focus on and talk about everything that you wish you had and cannot afford to do with your money, you focus your thoughts on what you need– then you are emanating a frequency of lack and need so you are resonating with lack and need and attracting more of the same into your future.
 If you get paid and you focus on everything that you have and can afford to pay for with that money, instead of focusing on everything you can’t pay for – you are focusing on the abundance that you have, which attracts more abundance towards you.
The trick is to learn how to change the perspective we take, and within that we learn how to transform the experience that we have.

That kind of explains why I think that it is valuable to do random acts of kindness, whenever you can, even if you don’t particularly have a religion telling you to be a good person otherwise you will go to hell, or if you don’t have the empathetic pangs making you feel the pain of those around you. You can always remember that you have more than everyone that has less than you, whether it be food, money, love, friendship or knowledge.... When you have more than someone, and they have a need that you can easily fill, but you decide not to share – you are emanating frequency of greed, which indicates that you believe your abundance is limited and should be hoarded and kept for yourself and that is a self-limiting belief that creates a destructive wave interference. When you see someone that is hungry and you decide to buy them some food because you can, you are emanating high frequencies of kindness and abundance, thus attracting kindness and abundance to you. In this way, you create the way that people see you and treat you, in the way that you treat others.

You get what you give. You reap what you sow. If you smile at people, they will smile at you. If you are not particularly nice to anyone, then people will not be particularly nice to you.

 This intertwines with another principle, the Principle of Correspondence, which regards the correlation between your inner world and outer world. ... The popular hermetic phrase “as above, so below” is often inserted here. This can be interpreted in many ways and can apply to life and the universe on many levels, but in this example – the Principle of Correspondence implies that your level and quality of thoughts is mirrored and corresponds to your perceived level and quality of life. The quality of your experience here on Earth corresponds to the quality of your thoughts which corresponds to the quality of your actions. Your inner world is reflected in how you see the outer world. You can directly influence all levels of your experience, by consciously affecting one aspect, which I think is easiest when you choose action.

So, what I mean and as I understand it, If I have a bad day – My thoughts are negative, I perceive my reality as negative, I perceive the way people interact with me as negative, my whole day feels like a pile of shit – There are different forms that my actions can take. Potentially, I can be miserable and stomp through the day feeling sorry for myself and hating everything and everyone, But I know that my emitting negativity will undoubtedly draw in and manifest even more negativity.  I could also feel miserable but recognise that there is something to learn from my current experience, there is something to learn from every experience. Another way that I can affectively change my experience is by spontaneously doing a random act of kindness. Because doing an action is easier than changing my train of thought... But by doing that action, I will immediately elevate my frequency. Receiving gratitude from the receiver of the kindness will effectively change where my head is at, and in turn, my perceived experience as well. Elevating, at least a bit, my overall experience of the day but also sending positive ripples out that could affect much more than just me and my experience.

In conclusion, there are many reasons why it is a good idea to be kind to others and do random acts of kindness. Not only can you potentially change the world for good and not only do all religions teach kindness and all religions teach to give to those less fortunate, Treat others the way you want to be treated.... If you choose not to base your beliefs or actions on what ancient books say, but rather look for modern scientific explanations – then perhaps studying more about frequency and waves can teach you about how to work with and effectively fine tune your mind and your actions into a frequency that resonates with a good experience in your outside world. A part of this fine tuning is learning how to consider the world as a whole that you are a piece of, instead of only considering yourself as an individual. This means overcoming the “me and mine” and overcoming greed. Giving freely, knowing that what you give is what you receive.

As a final thought – I challenge every reader, to go and do a random act of kindness for a random person. See how it makes you feel. If you like it, make it a habit in your life. Consider that you might wish for someone to do something kind for you when you need it, so if you see someone with a need that you know you can fill, just do it. Being kind can cost nothing and it could be a life changing habit that benefits others as well as for yourself.