30 Random Acts of Wha?!?!

I'm turning the big 3-0 tomorrow.  I'm not sure how to feel. I remember when I was a little girl and my friends' sister turned 16 and I thought 16 was so old and mature... and then my brother turned 21 and 21 was so old.  And little bit by little bit I joined the "old and mature" and didn't feel any differently. When I was 16, I didn't feel like how I had pictured 16 to feel.  And the same with 21, 25, etc.  So when I think of turning 30 I just don't know how to feel or act for that matter.  Am I supposed to dress differently? Be more mature or act a certain way? Because I haven't done any super changing in my demeanor.  I feel, act and lets admit still dress like I did at 21, 25 and 27.

One of the things I wanted to do was chronicle 30 random acts of kindness celebrating 30 years of life. I thought I'd take all of September to do good deeds around my neighborhood and community, celebrating my birthday each day before the big day.

And then I realized something about myself.... just because I was doing these awesome kind things to people, it wasn't necessarily making me kinder.  It was just making me prouder of myself and my accomplishments.  I started making a list of how kind I was and then *poof* I had one of the worst mother/wife/joanna days in my life and I was super unkind and black hearted and seriously almost yelled at a woman in Costco.  No, that's not an exaggeration. I. Almost. Yelled (out loud!). At. Her.  It was the cherry on top of a bad sundae and it took all my strength to turn around and walk away from her.

I'd like to tell you what she did and justify myself but here's the thing~ she didn't deserve it.  Even if "she did" in my eyes.  No one deserves to be publicly (or even privately) belittled.

So I scrapped my idea of 30 random acts of kindness.  I think it's good for people to try to accomplish and even this lady here and her blog about helping people which inspired me in the first place, it's great for them to do it and to post about it because I believe their hearts are in the right place.  But I was being kind with the praises in mind.

So I am going to go stealth mode on being kind and work on my motivations and heart instead of working on doing noticeably good deeds.  And just FYI~ this is mostly for me. I'm not good at doing things "behind the curtain" so if you are than I admire you for that.  I prefer to be the star of my show, the solo act.

But now I see that focusing on the random acts themselves doesn't necessarily change who I am.  Instead I need to focus on my heart within and hope that by changing my heart out of that will overflow kindness and goodness.

So here's to my 30s. Lord willing, years and years of random acts of kindness so random even I'm not aware I'm doing them.