A good deed a day keeps the devil away

From Queen Esther’s blog:

Do one kind deed every day without letting anyone know. Isn’t that a nice idea? I’m so used to wanting and needing positive feedback from people. This allows you to work on not needing that. It helps you work on doing things with the right intention. Not in order to impress people, but purely to help someone.

I think the anonymous aspect makes a huge amount of difference. Not only does it help make sure that we do good deeds for the right reason (and not to impress other people, as Queen Esther says), but it also makes it a lot more fun. :) (That’s if you can keep yourself from bubbling over with excitement, of course.)

I’m going to do this, starting today. But I won’t really be able to blog about it, now, will I. :)

I agree that anonymous is grand, especially for the giver and I ought to try it more often, but sometimes knowing that it was *that* person becomes more meaningful than the act itself.

Queen Esther, huh? Maybe I’m just ignorant, but that sounds like a cool portmanteau word of Ester and Ether. Awesome! :D

It’s like the Thais say, ปิดทองหลังพระ — to apply gold leaf to the back side of a Buddha image. That is, to do good deeds without being seen.

Agree fully.
On occasion, you might want to see for yourself how skilled you actually are at taking recognition for good deeds in the right way - that is, without it going to your head.
But experiment strictly on occasions where the outcome cannot produce significant problems this way or that.

On occasion, keep extreme comforts away and adopt a utilitarian lifestyle to see how other less-privileged people face problems of myriad types and also how much you are personally dependent on certain comforts.
If you are a normal chap like me, you’ll find that roughly every other time you indulge, you come out a loser. But beware of overdoing this - don’t get into a dangerous self-correction cycle.
Only minor, reasonable austerities lead to independence from comforts. Burdening yourself with too much austerity is as bad as its exact opposite, which is, excessive and mindless indulgence.

So, play around with these things is inconsequential places in life.

Remember, experimenting at random will produce results at random that is, it is _very_ _dangerous_. Do good or do nothing.

I don’t know that experimenting at random is as dangerous as you think. :) After all, a lot of times random tinkering around can lead to creative breakthroughs that you never would have come across otherwise…