Kindness and TED, Take 2

You can be miserable before you have a cookie and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie but you can't be miserable while you are eating a cookie.
― Ina Garten

Inspired by Shawn Achor's widely viewed TED talk, three university students decided to perform a very sweet random act of kindness at the University of Virginia during finals week in December.  Two brothers and a friend bought nine boxes of freshly made chocolate chip cookies and passed them out to students studying for their finals. 

One of the things that was interesting to me was that one of the young men admitted that it was "a little weird at the beginning" as they approached strangers.  But, of course, the cookie recipients were grateful, even if initially surprised.  The young man's apprehension and the recipients' surprise are pretty common in kindness situations.  How often have we hesitated about reaching out because of how we think the other person might react? 

We hear and read so much about young people not knowing how to relate to each other given their obsession with technology, so I found it wonderful that three university students could get excited about sharing kindness.