ABOVE: Keynote Speaker and Author Nahla Summers gets in motion as she leaves The Bicycle Shoppe in Fairmont on Friday. She is currently going across southern Minnesota in a straight line, before dipping down into Iowa to make the D in KINDNESS she is spelling across 2,000 miles of travel.

FAIRMONT – On a 2,000-mile journey to spell the word ‘KINDNESS’ out in America, Keynote Speaker and Author Nahla Summers made a stop in Fairmont on Friday.

The original inspiration for Summers, a native of England, to devote her life to being a speaker and challenge-taker came after her partner died suddenly while on a charity bike ride.

“It was really kindness that helped me through my grief, and the kindness of strangers,” she said. “What it gave me was a fascination in how we measure success as a society. So often we will look at success as being how much money we earn, how much we’re putting into a pension, our life insurance policy, everything is based on finance. When we come to the end of our days, that isn’t what we measure our success on. It will be the connections and those moments in time that we’ve had with people.”

From this realization, Summers made the move to spread awareness in a different way.

“I became fascinated by the idea on what would happen if I started doing challenges,” she said. “Instead of asking people to give money to a charity, which I had previously done, what would happen if I asked people to do an act of kindness instead? I wanted to start to measure human connection and kindness, and then see what happened.”

Challenges Summers has done include climbing Snowdon, the highest point in Wales, cycling 3,000 miles across America in 2018, and spelling out kindness, mapped like a fully uppercase KINDNESS, across England in 2020, as part of a 5,007-mile journey. While she was inspired by a friend to do it then as a way to finish her run, Summers said it has taken on a new meaning now.

“A lot has happened,” she said. “The world has changed, the division is palpable, what’s going on in America is very much happening in the UK and probably has been happening in many other countries for many years, but we haven’t been hearing about it. The division is difficult.”

While she originally chose to do the Midwest, starting in the middle of Minnesota and ending in Southern Iowa, due to its flatter terrain, Summers said the recent events in Minneapolis made it even more relevant to her mission.

“Everything really pieced itself together,” she said. “I saw the bike, it was 50 miles away from the start of the route on Facebook Marketplace. I’ve never ridden this bike before. We don’t have them in the UK. I am completely untrained physically for this. I didn’t do any training on any sort of bike, in fact, running, nothing. I’ve been training on the go.”

So far, the rural areas have made quite an impression on Summers.

“The waves that people do, too,” she said. “Nobody knows me, unless they’ve all seen it on social media, and how many waves, I stopped counting because everybody waves. I’ve only just really noticed it, because I started looking in all the vehicles and realized that they’re all waving at me. There’s something in the smaller rural areas, people protect each other, they know each other, and they’ve got each other’s back, generally, and that is what I’ve experienced.”

Across her journey up to this point, Summers said she has enjoyed the connections she’s made the most.

“The people, the stories, talking to people and meeting them,” she said. “It’s my greatest pleasure from all of the things that I have done, all the challenges that I’ve done, is where I get the privilege of being invited into somebody’s home or somebody’s space in any form, and people share their stories with me of their life. That’s the greatest gift.”

A pass-through was made by Summers in Fairmont on Friday, as she wanted someone to take a look at her bike, which had had some issues. After Larry Vogel of The Bicycle Shoppe looked it over and told her what was wrong, Summers made her leave, already behind schedule due to the rain Friday morning.

She said she plans to return sometime later on, as her route has her loop around to the Fairmont area to complete the D in KINDNESS. Summers plans to complete her journey by July 20. For more information, visit nahlasummers.com/usa.