A Rare Act of Kindness
Yesterday, I was carrying home from work an 88-key MIDI controller (a long keyboard of the musical variety) in quite possibly the most impractical box in the world. The walk home from work is about two miles, so my arms were beginning to give up at the end. I had just put the box down on the road to take a few seconds when a stranger came up to me and asked, “Do you need some help with that?”. Normally, I’d thank him for the offer and decline, but this one was a little too good to pass up. “That’d be great, thank you”, I replied, and he grabbed the other end of the box. “It’s nothing!”, he said.
Now, there’s a railway station on the route to my home, and this was where the stranger was headed. When we reached it, I said somewhat insistently, “I can take it from here”, to which he responded by shaking his head and saying, “My train isn’t leaving for another three minutes, I might as well help you carry this for one more minute”. We almost reached my house before he had to put his end of the box down on the ground and rush off to catch the train. “Good luck to you!”, he said as he left.
How nice it was to experience a truly selfless act of kindness, void of any hidden agendas or ulterior motives. It may have been nothing to the stranger—whose name I didn’t even catch—but it made my day.