AMOK 2018: Week One

A few days ago, I wrote a post about my plan for this year’s Annual Melee of Kindness. My personal AMOK plan is to do one act of kindness a day from June 16th to July 15th, and to focus on keeping those acts simple. No elaborate planning, no spending large amounts of money (living on a post-grad school budget here!), nothing too big or scary. Because sometimes we forget that kindness is accessible, and that small kindnesses still make huge differences in the world. I’m hoping that this AMOK I can show anyone reading this exactly how easy incorporating acts of kindness into daily life can be. 

You can read about what I did for days 1, 2, and 3 over at this post.

Day Four: June 19th, 2018
My parents were still out of town, and my brother had a long work day, which left me home alone with the cat all day. I saw this as the perfect opportunity to play some music and deep clean as much of the house as I could. Cleaning can be cathartic, and it helps calm down my anxiety to be in a cleaner space, so this doubled as self-care. Win-win! 

Day Five: June 20th, 2018
This was a yummy day! We had a bunch of strawberries in the house, so I went shopping for a few extra ingredients and made a (gluten free) strawberry angel food cake for the family. Tasty, easy, and something nice for my parents to come home to after a rough drive back to town. Here’s the super easy recipe I used.

Day Six: June 21, 2018
Ahhh, day six. This was a rough day. You know those days where you struggle to get out of bed and you feel on the verge of crying all day long? Yeah, it was one of those ones. I had the greatest plans of pushing through and Doing Something for AMOK. Those plans changed because as evening approached, it became obvious that I couldn’t help others until I took some time to heal. Self-kindness is still kindness, and sometimes it can be easy to forget exactly how important self-care and self-kindness are. My AMOK activity for day six ended up involving sitting in bed, drinking tea, listening to an audiobook, and coloring. Because taking care of yourself helps you to be in top condition to take care of others, too.

Day Seven: June 22, 2018
I had two friends over for some Friday night fun (read: pizza, a second strawberry angel food cake, and binge watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and I put them to work with day seven’s AMOK task. We colored, made cards, and wrote notes while watching TV. Fun friend bonding time, and it’s kind! The cards/coloring pages/notes are being sent off to foster kids, hospitalized kids, and immigrant kids in shelters. It was such a fun way to spend a Friday night and it felt like the perfect thing to wrap up week one of AMOK.

And… that was week one! So far, I’m really enjoying the focus that I’ve put on simplicity because it has lowered the stress level. Honestly, keeping it small scale like this has also made AMOK much more fun. I’m having a blast thinking of little things to do every day instead of worrying about planning something “good enough”.

You can keep up with other people’s AMOK adventures, find great ideas for how to get kind this AMOK, or document your own acts of kindness in the #AMOKRA tag on social media (especially Twitter).

What are some simple kindness activities you’d like to see me try this coming week?