A simple act, a response to a situation without thought, done from the heart and not the ego – a simple act of helping a stranger – not in a big way, but in a teeny tiny miniscule way – probably forgotten by all those involved by now, two days later, except for me. I am inspired by one of the people involved – the cashier at the local convenient store.
Two customers, a woman and a boy, were being rung up by two separate workers at the same time. As the woman’s transaction ended, the boy’s rang up a bit over the amount of cash laid on the counter. The young man walked away to grab another dollar as the woman reached into her wallet and gave his cashier a dollar bill to cover the cost. It was an automatic response – no time transpired between the cashier saying that the boy was short and the dollar being handed to him. Then, as the change came out of the automatic dispenser, she gave the remainder of the dollar in change to the cashier.
The cashier responded with, “I’ll pay it forward to the next customer who needs it!” Such a small act of kindness that began(I hope) a journey of other small acts. How many small acts of kindness do we provide without thought? How many kindness seeds can we plant that grow to enormous kindness trees with branches upon branches of small acts? I wonder if we each completed one small act of kindness to a stranger each day, how would the world be different?