It’s random acts of kindness week in B.C. A small group of children started the week off a few years ago in their neighborhood, and the project took on a life of it’s own, like a stream that could not be contained within its banks.
I’ve asked a lot of people about their experiences with ‘unsolicited kindness.’ Everyone has experienced this mysterious force. There are stories that fall on your heart like sweet rain. Can you imagine if we heard such tales every day on the news?
Here’s mine:
A few years ago I was leaving a week- long meditation retreat. I was with a friend, and we didn’t know the area very well, or how to get to the main highway from where we were. We were still very deep in some meditative state. I was driving, and it wasn’t feeling so easy, even to drive round this quiet neighborhood. We got thoroughly lost in about 10 minutes.
I stopped at a mall. There were a few cars and people around. I looked way across the parking lot and saw a guy standing beside his blue truck. Somehow I knew that he was the one.
I walked over, told him we were lost, and asked him for directions. He was very kind, and repeated them a few times for me, while I wrote them down. I could see him looking at me, picking right up on the state I was in.
I walked back to my car, and he waved and wished me luck. He was going home, back in the other direction. I got back in the car with my friend and we drove off. This time, due to the totally altered state we were both in, it only took us five minutes to get lost again. But now we were right in the middle of heavy traffic, and it was not going to be easy to stop. I could feel myself starting to panic. I looked out the window, and there was my guy who had given us the directions, right behind us in his blue truck-honking and waving us into the next lane, where we would turn right. I realized that he had turned around and followed me, knowing that I was not really capable of following his directions.
I turned right and started to get my bearings. I leaned out the window and shouted to him, “Thank you, I’m okay now-go back home!”
“No way,” he shouted back at me, “I’m staying with you till you get to the bridge.”
And he did. It was a good ten minute ride, and he stuck with us the whole way, until we turned onto the bridge and waved him goodbye.
Perhaps it was because of the state I was in that day, but I never really got over it. This ordinary looking guy in blue jeans with his pick up truck had a heart as big as the moon. He had absolutely nothing to gain by taking care of us like that. I’ll never see him again, and I don’t know his name. But he lives on, inside me.
0 
