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Home » Just Blogging

Pay It Forward

Written by on November 9, 2008 – 6:00 am28 Comments | 3 Read this
The Gift From France

The Gift From France

Do you believe in ran­dom acts of kindness?

Last Octo­ber, Bar­bara from Home in France intro­duced me to the “Pay It For­ward” game.

Accord­ing to the rules, “the exchange focuses on doing an act of kind­ness with­out expect­ing any­thing in return other than that the recip­i­ent will, in their turn, pass the kind­ness along and pay it for­ward in their own way.” I was one of the com­menter who agreed to receive a small gift (you bet I was!) and to pass it on to other bloggers.

True to her word, Bar­bara sent me a small gift that I received this week end: two nice book­marks. She must have guessed I love reading!

And Bar­bara picked the per­fect gift! One of the book­mark has a quote of Bob Dylan (whom I love!): “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” — per­fect for trav­el­ers like us! The other one has pic­tures of the famous Petit beurre LU. I was born and raised in Nantes, France, and the sym­bol if the city is con­stant rain the Petit beurre LU, because that’s where was based the The Lefèvre-Utile bis­cuit fac­tory (see a pic­ture of the fac­tory tower I took when I was in France in March).

So merci beau­coup Barbara!

Now, I’d like to send you guys some­thing. Accord­ing to the rules, “I am going to agree to send some­thing fun, inspir­ing or uplift­ing” to three ran­dom com­menters. I’ll use a ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tor to pick the lucky ones. In turn, those three will post this infor­ma­tion and pick 3 peo­ple they want to send some­thing to and so on.

This is the third time I receive some­thing from fel­low blog­gers: I got a troll from Nor­way, from Ren­nyBA, and more recently, Shionge sent me a sur­prise pack­age from Sin­ga­pore. We are all used to email and vir­tual net­work­ing, but I’m telling you, receiv­ing a sur­prise by reg­u­lar mail is a great thing to expe­ri­ence.

So… com­ment, be nice, and I’ll be your Santa Claus!

The ran­dom pick

I used a ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tor to pick three com­menters to participate:

Send me your address, girls, and wait for Santa Claus!

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28 Comments »

  • Scarlet says:
    November 9, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    Of course, I want to play this game. Bring it on! ;)

    Reply to this comment »
  • Muse says:
    November 9, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    I believe in ran­dom acts of kind­ness, which i’ve been sub­jected to in my inter­net years since the early 90’s. I used to have a PO box so i felt more com­fort­able giv­ing out my “address”, and one man from swe­den send me some swedish choco­late out of the blue! He used to hear me talk about how amer­i­can choco­late is not the same as ger­man all the time when I hosted a forum on com­puserve and decided to send me some. Guess he wanted to prove swedish choco­late was far supe­rior to ger­man. :)

    Then another inter­net friend found me on ama­zon and sent me a non-refundable gift that i tried very hard to return. I have a hard time accept­ing things from peo­ple and this was way too much, he bought me a dvd player. I was an avid movie buff and wanna be movie critic at the time. And this was back in the days when they were expen­sive. Ama­zon as I found out won’t take back gift items, it was way too much tho. Then a cou­ple of years ago after my car was bro­ken into an inter­net friend offered to buy me a new stereo, i had to decline. I know it’s prob­a­bly very rude to not accept gifts but is it wrong?

    I guess i’ve just always felt that I have to pay some­one back for what they give me in equal terms. But it has shown me in my life there are peo­ple who do good things and expect noth­ing in return other than the sat­is­fac­tion they have made some­ones day. The ges­ture to me is more reward­ing than the gift could ever be. :)

    Reply to this comment »
  • Sidney says:
    November 9, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    That is a nice game…

    Reply to this comment »
  • Gabriel says:
    November 9, 2008 at 11:59 pm

    This is a great con­cept. I have writ­ten about ran­dom acts of kind­ness before, and I have read sto­ries that brought warmth to my heart.

    Look­ing for­ward to see how it con­tin­ues.… oh, and by the way, thank you for your visit and comments.

    Reply to this comment »
  • noha says:
    November 10, 2008 at 12:07 am

    Haha Zhu, I just fol­lowed your com­ment on my Rud­yard Kipling post and read your “about the author” and the funny thing is, I’m a civil ser­vant tak­ing Group French Classes. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll end up in one of your classes :)

    Reply to this comment »
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