Poetic, Inspirational Living

There are few things as discouraging as being pick-pocketed on Christmas Eve. This is what happened to my mother while we were doing some last minute shopping in London. It happened right after we made our last purchases and she didn’t realize her wallet was missing until we received a call a few hours later from the shopping mall where we had been. My mother’s wallet had been handed in to mall security with her passport and credit cards still inside, but without the $400 she had withdrawn from an ATM on arriving. Unfortunately, the woman explained to my mother over the phone, the mall would not be open until the 27^th of December and they were shutting in a half an hour (we were in the UK at the time). My mother would never be able to make it in time to pick up her wallet with the Christmas traffic before the store shut. After finding out where we were staying, the young woman on the phone offered to stop by on her way home from work and return the wallet to my mother personally. It was about 20 minutes out of her way and my mom gladly agreed. Two hours later she opened the front door to a young woman holding her wallet and passport.

Now, for those of you who haven’t been to London in the past decade, London transportation and traffic make the notion of going 20 minutes out of the way on your commute seem like an act from a saint. When my mom told us about what this woman had done, we all sat there looking dumbfounded. It’s one thing to notify her that her wallet was handed in at the mall, it’s another thing to go out of her way on Christmas Eve, late in the evening, to actually return it.

It was one of those acts of kindness that made us realize how cynical we are most of the time. The fact that this woman had gone out of her way to make sure that my mother’s vacation wasn’t effectively ruined by having her wallet stolen was so exceptional it made me step back and acknowledge the fact that acts of kindness are pretty rare in most of our lives and that we should all endeavour to incorporate them into our own behaviour.

Picture courtesy of flickr.