I’ll admit, I haven’t had much time to experience the phenomenon I’m speaking about, but it was something of an epiphany to me, so I want to write about it anyway.
On the weekend after Independence day, our family made a road trip down to Nashville, Tennessee. The 4.5 hour drive wasn’t bad at all, as we have driven 17-18 hours (Philadelphia to Missouri) in a day. It was 2am Saturday morning when we arrived, and we settled in to sleep immediately.
Skipping over the events of the next morning, we arrive at Saturday evening. We were going our to dinner with my parents’ old friends. These people were incredibly kind, and you could tell just from talking to them that they were filled with a seemingly limitless amount of generosity.
We were leaving on Sunday morning, and as we were doing so I experienced something that has affected my perspective of life immensely. My parents were checking out while Raghav and I guarded the luggage. At this time, the two of us happened to be sitting next to an older man working away on his laptop. He seemed to notice us and took a break from his typing to have a conversation with us.
We talked for a short amount of time until my parents picked us up to head out. Right was we were leaving, the same man comes up and stops my mother just to tell her that he though we were very good kids. This struck me because that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done on my behalf. I was even more surprised because I didn’t even know this man’s name, and he had no reason to come up to my mother other than pure generosity.
This event was pretty important to me because something like that really just changes your perspective of the world. Just when it seems you’ve got people figured out, they surprise you. It reminded me that for all the evil in this world, there’s just as much good. These small acts make a big difference, and it’s people like him who inspire me to be a kinder person.
I don’t know if that man at the Gaylord Opryland Resort will ever read this or know how much his actions that weekend meant to me, but I want to say thank you, to him and all the other people who do these kind things without expecting anything in return.
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