Share some love

The Ultimate Intervention Day! Today was a day to be remembered!

First of all, it was the nicest weather of the year so far. It was sunny, warm and we could actually see the first signs of spring. Everybody seamed happy, using bright colors and carrying a big smile.

We decided to go to Washington Square, which is usually a nice place, but specially today, there were tones of events happening at the same time. All of them about happiness. José Saramago has a book in which everybody from a city suddenly wakes up blind, well, in New York it looked like today, everybody woke up kind!

I set my booth as usual, but the goal for today was to “Share some Love”. In order for people to participate, they should write a small note to a stranger, fold it and leave it in the box, and only then, they could pick up another random note that a stranger had just left.

The notes were anonymous and I did not peak in. The goal was to make everybody feel comfortable and hope that they’d just do the right (and kind) thing and write positive comments.

And it worked out! Once people picked their notes, they would read it out loud to me, and they were all very fun and uplifting. It was almost as a crowd sourced fortune cookie.

This intervention made me realize that sometimes people just don’t do anything spontaneously nice just because they don’t know where to start, or they might afraid of directly interacting with strangers.

By creating a platform for them to be able to touch a stranger’s heart without needing to run any risk, I removed that concern and everyone was able to have some fun with it.

I found this a great way to challenge people to be more proactive towards kindness and to bright a bit their days. They were all very satisfied with the notes their strangers had left for them.

And I had a lot of great help today: Chris Choi and Burcum Turkmen were there recording and marketing the event with me. And also Liz Kauff was doing a parallel intervention, which I will talk about in the next post.

Chris Choi, Burcum Turkmen, Isadora Dantas