Last night at the grocery store the woman three overflowing carts in front of me was having some issues at the register. I have no idea what was going on because I was too far away to hear but I know her groceries were mostly scanned and situated in her cart and she wasn’t leaving lane 15. Shoppers were continuing to line up behind me but there wasn’t much progress being made in the actual moving forward of the line.
I started wondering why I always pick the aisle where there is a price check as Parker pleaded for anything sugarcoated and eye level. I probably let out an audible sigh and Parker probably did too when I offered him bottled water instead of those nasty push-up suckers that even come in king-size now.
There was a little movement towards the front of the line so I craned my neck to see. The woman next in line was giving something to the woman keeping us all from our hurry to get home because, OMG what would happen if the frozen corn melts? Then the lady at the front of the line waved a bill in the air and announced “I got a dollar!” with a smile like she just won the lotto.
We were all smiling then. No one remembered we’d been standing in line for longer than we’d grocery shopped. I was smiling and the cashier was smiling and the other full basket pushers were looking at each other and smiling and that one dollar made us all so stinking happy.
The huffers and puffers and sighers of lane 15 were all happy now, not because the line was finally moving but because kindness is more contagious than eye-rolls. I left my grocery shopping trip so content about the world we live in because of that little old woman twirling her dollar in the air and because of the younger woman who handed it to her.
I’ve had a hard time being online lately. There is so much negativity. In a world were everyone can hide behind a computer screen and say whatever they feel necessary, people do just that. I’ve seen so many eager to cling to negativity or jump down someone else’s throat before they fully understand what the other person is trying to say. The judgement and lack of patience shown online is the same we throw out there from the anonymity of our cars or our full grocery carts.
Small acts of kindness can turn into so much more. Negative threads and comments ultimately die down because everyone finds their next issue to pick away at but the positive ones seem to only grow. They grow from dollars donated to families being lifted up and people connecting in ways they never could have before social media.
I’m not sure why it’s so hard to remember that kindness wins. It always does.
Now who needs a dollar? I’m still feeling guilty over my supermarket sigh and have yet to run into another little old lady looking even remotely distraught so I can hand her money and absolve myself of my grocery shopping sins.
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Hurray for kindness and happy endings! My day is always so much better when I find a way to help another person. xo
Thanks for the uplifting story. I am with you on being full-up on negative commentary online. I was writing a review and reading others for a really good tidying up book; a woman wrote how proud she was that she had downloaded her copy instead of buying something else to clutter up her space. So the next person wrote, but you are cluttering up your hard drive, and you’ll have to de-frag, and your computer will be so much slower! REALLY?! LOL! It’s like there are people searching for some negative angle on anything these days. 😉 So thanks for keeping the positivity going. 🙂
what a great reminder. Kindness matters!
I keep telling myself I’m not going to read the comments on contentious articles anymore. It just brings me down to see so much negativity all the time. So why should I even look?
So glad that there was a happy ending on aisle 15.
That was a great reminder! I love helping others, it’s a great thing to focus on the positive things in life!