The Impact of Random Act of Kindness - Wisdom4Humanity with Patrick Mosher

I'm dating myself with this story. I walked out of the restaurant and into the corner phone booth. If you don't know what a phone booth is, search the internet for it. The Smithsonian reported in 2015 that a phone booth was put on the National Register of Historic Places. On with the story. There I was in the phone booth. I completed checking my work voicemails. Ready to push through the phone booth doors, I stop. I turn around and decide to put a quarter on top of the phone. A simple, random act of kindness. Someone may not have pocket change to make an important call. Fast forward 6 weeks. My friend Chris is telling me about a terrible night he had. Everything was going wrong that day. You know how those days go. One thing piles up on another. And that night, he gets hopelessly lost trying to visit a friend, and his car gets a flat. Chris is so frustrated, mad, defeated, feeling helpless and hopeless. He walks a half mile to the nearest phone booth, reaches in his pocket, and realizes he left his wallet at home. No change in his pocket. In an act of total despair and giving up, he puts his head on the face of the telephone and reaches his hands up on top of the telephone, seeking something in the space that will carry his weight, just for a moment, the one solid thing in this space. And his fingers find, you guessed it, a quarter. As Chris is telling me his story, his face lights up as if he had just won the lottery. I've never seen someone so happy to have found a quarter. And I'm in tears, not from laughter, gratitude. I tell Chris about how 6 weeks earlier I left a quarter on the top of the telephone in a booth as a random act of kindness. And Chris begins to cry. Not the same phone booth, but that quarter somehow ended up in the right place at the right time. I wonder how many hands it went through over that 6 weeks. We do our random acts of kindness in the world and expect nothing in return. Sometimes the universe gives us that teeny little bit of acknowledgement. Prayer sent. Prayer received. Prayer answered. The universe sends little acknowledgments all the time. Just keep your eyes and heart open. The universe is perfect.