Pay It Forward

The other night I watched one of my favorite movies, "Pay It Forward", for the third time. I was stretching and sipping at my bottle of Gatorade in front of the T.V., listening to the soothing Hawaiian music playing along with the T.V. program guide on channel 12 when I saw that "Pay It Forward" was on. It's the movie with Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment (the little boy from the "Sixth Sense"). Excitedly I switched to the channel that was playing the movie and was just in time to catch the final third of the movie.

There are so many words that run through my mind as I try to find the right one or two words to describe the movie: sad, inspiring, real, moving, relatable, heart wrenching, intense, powerful, etc. The idea behind the movie is so simple yet so genius: when done a favor, instead of directly paying back the person who performed the favor, pay the person back by doing three new good deeds for three new people. The movie demonstrates the phenomenon that can occur if everyone were to follow through with this idea; one person does a good deed for three other people, who each then do good deeds for three new people, and so on. It's a domino effect that can multiply and spread throughout the community, state, nation, and world.

This movie inspires me to carry on this idea in my own life and to perform good deeds for others every day. When talking about doing good deeds, it doesn't necessarily mean that I have to do some kind of extravagant service project. A good deed can be as small as giving a friend a compliment, or helping a teammate with equipment duty, to being as big as organizing a fundraiser for the homeless. Whatever the size of the deed, it is the act of doing the deed, the intangible effect it has on the receiver, not the deed itself that makes it special. The fact that someone does a good deed for another shows that they care about the other person, and that the other person is worthy of their time and effort to do the deed. I may be rambling; does this make sense?