GIVE IT AWAY
Some stranger somewhere still remembers you.
A single instant, a quick glance or a passing gesture that you never thought anything about has echoed through their life like a familiar voice calling us home.
Wouldn’t it be cool to know who they are, what you did, where you did it, when and why it mattered?
Could there be a better gift than learning how many people have you on that priceless list?
How many are on yours?
There’s an old woman in Austria whose eyes locked on mine from a Salzburg bus.
She looked at me like a mother of a graduate crossing the stage – overflowing with pride in the achievement and filled with the melancholy that comes when that child walks from that stage into another chapter of their life. A softly shutting screen door.
She closed her eyes, slowly put her hands to her mouth and blew me a kiss.
It made the kids standing at the bus stop in front of me turn around, wondering just who I was and what just happened.
And then she was gone… but I’ve never forgotten her.
If you are lucky like me, there are more than one.
Like the blonde-haired Parisian girl sitting in the back of a small, red Renault whose eyes followed me as the car rounded the corner in front of the brasserie. A smile pulled at the corners of her mouth as she disappeared into the forever.
Like the denim and leather clad biker in the Lawrence Center cafeteria that shared his dream of getting old with deep laugh lines surrounding the eyes on his wind-swept face to an audience that would likely never see that in their futures.
Like the anonymous soul that wrapped a desperately needed lifeline in an ivory-colored, linen-blend envelope that slid through the mail slot last week.
These minute actions and reactions don’t take time or thought or practice…
they just need to be given away.
And the more we give away, the longer that list of strangers becomes.
In the end, those strangers will all become friends.
So let’s give it all away and have the faith to know that we’ll get it back.
Make some no15e.