On Monday, I received a call from a receptionist at the Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa in response to a request I had made during the weekend for help with finding the graves of two Hollington ancestors. Armaghan provided the most thoughtful and kind service. She committed to getting me information by the end of the day about not just the two Hollingtons I was searching but also all the Hollingtons in the cemetery (there are about a dozen, and I'm related to all of them).

Today, after not yet having received Armaghan's email, I figured that an error in my email address was the likely cause. So I called the Beechwood Cemetery and spoke with Raymond. He, too, was absolutely lovely. He looked in the Beechwood Cemetery's correspondence system and moments later asked,

— "Is your name Hollington?"

— "Yes," I said, excited that he had been successful in tracking down my file so quickly.

— "I couldn't find anything," he replied.

— "Really?" I blurted out, wondering how he could know my name if he hadn't found my file.

— "I'm just kidding," he said with a chuckle. I laughed too.

Raymond corrected the erroneous email address and committed to forwarding Armaghan's email to me right away. True to his word, I had the email in my inbox in minutes.

I reviewed the documents that Armaghan had pulled together for me, and I was blown away. For each Hollington, Armaghan had provided an annotated map to help me find the precise location of my relatives' graves. I replied to Raymond's email to thank him for kindly forwarding his colleague's email so quickly. And I replied to Armaghan to say, "I am immensely grateful for your fast and thorough response to my request. I am so impressed with the package of information you put together for me. Such attentive service is not as common these days as one might want, which makes your efforts all the more remarkable. Thank you so very much!"

It was fitting that I was the beneficiary of such kind service today, this being World Kindness Day. The organization behind this celebration, the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, says that, "Every November 13th, the world joins together to celebrate World Kindness Day—a global reminder of how small acts of kindness can create a ripple effect that strengthens our connections to one another."

The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation is a small nonprofit that is trying to "make kindness the norm." Through its website, it offers a wide range of helpful tools, including kindness ideas and kindness quotes.

Here are my top five favourite kindness ideas from the website:

And here are my top 5 favourite kindness quotes from the website:

I leave you with a statement from the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation video The Science of Kindness: "Studies have shown that if you perform just one random act of kindness a day, you'll not only reduce your stress, anxiety and depression, but your body is flooded with the same hormones that make you and the person you've helped feel calmer, healthier and happier." That's the so-called giver's high, which makes the purveyor of kindness feel just as good as the recipient.