I am not finishing yet!

Honestly, I could not wait for school and all the busy life to start after summer holiday. Now I cannot wait for holiday to come again. I have entered into a bit challenging semester this year. Subjects that I have are considered to be tough alone, I have six of them at once. Moreover, I have been given the opportunity to participate on translation of a psychology book from English to Czech. I supposed that it would be a piece of cake since I am able to communicate both in English and Czech and joining these two abilities together cannot be any rocket science! I was wrong. Now I understand why people study so long to be translators. It is a rocket science! Only the title took me few days to figure out how Czechs would say it. I asked about eight people to see if we would translate the expression “Illustrative Case Reports” the same. I got eight different answers plus the one that I created. How would you deal with it?

Nevertheless, I do not want you to think that the only thing I do is suffering, I would like to share my experience with an experiment from Positive Psychology.  At the end of October, a group of American Psychology students, who are currently studying in Denmark for one semester (is it complicated enough?). They came to repeat an experiment they conducted previously in Copenhagen. Have you heard about the theory that making others happy makes you happier, than making happy yourself? If you want to feel happy spend the last few pounds in your wallet to buy a sandwich for a homeless (whose existence is the same important for you as your friend’s shoe size).

We carried out the experiment as follows: we created smaller groups of eight people and we were given 300 Czech Crowns (not much, you may say…) to spend them on the purposes of others any way we wanted. I was little bit afraid of the people’s reactions because the same time huge doughnut pre-election campaigns were taking place. We started at Namesti Miru, where we paid an ice-cream for a lady with her children. Firstly, she did not know how to react but then she smiled and said “how a beautiful day”. We the do this again but an American girl made the payment instead. This was more confusing for the people because they did not understand or they though they do not do so.

We spent the rest on flowers which we were randomly giving to the people who were passing us. We gave them to men, women, young and old to see the differences in responses. The biggest surprise for us happened when one of the American girls gave a flower to young man. He smiled and was pleased that someone gave him a flower, then he passed away. But after a while he came back with a box of “ruměnky” and gave it to us explaining that those are typical Czech cookies and since we make him happy he must have given something to us back. He just shifted our experiment to a brand new level.

Nevertheless, it is possible to make the acts of kindness without spending a penny. There is nothing easier than helping older people to scramble up in to the tram, to let them sit or to left the last discounted oil in a shelf for the old lady who travelled through the city to get it, and so on. Try to include few acts of kindness into your super-busy lives and observe what impact I will have on you. I personally, almost started to light from the endless happiness and energy that this experiment gave me.