Mission #1 – Sept 8, 2018

Welcome to the 2018 Compassion Games!

As a member of the International Kindness Team (IKT), you have been deputized as a “secret agent of compassion.” Each day for the next 16 days you’ll be receiving a “mission,” a task of goodwill designed to be simple enough to complete that day and broad enough to allow you to interpret it in a way that is meaningful to you.

Today’s mission is to have you engage in an act of mindful gratitude, the goal of which is twofold. First, completing it will contribute to an increase in positivity on the planet. And second, it will help prepare you for the missions to come.

To complete the mission, we point you to the inspiring work of Brother David Steindl-Rast and his “Stop. Look. Go.” practice. It involves three steps:

1) STOP. This means to center yourself. Stand or sit down. Close your eyes. Focus on your breathing for at least 30 seconds.
2) LOOK. Having centered yourself, open your eyes and become curious about your environment. Find one simple thing for which you can be grateful and focus on that.
3) GO. Now allow an idea for a positive action to emerge from your focused attention. It need not be anything elaborate; in fact, it’s best if it’s something simple that you can complete within the next hour. Complete the action.

As you move forward through the games, come back to this exercise any time you feel a need to center yourself. It’s a simple and effective way to gain calm focus.

Also, to help spread the goodwill generated by completing the missions, please take a few minutes each day to report your activity on the Compassion Map. Doing so will help solidify in your mind what you’ve done while creating a legacy of our collective activity that will be there to inspire others.

As you play and if you use social media, you are encouraged to use one of our secret agent of compassion avatars as your profile photo. And if you use Facebook, you’ll find the missions being promoted here.