Each Tuesday, I’m going to share something I am either:
a) thankful for, b) something I witnessed that was an act of kindness, or
c) something I did to “pay it forward”
(via JJ)
Whenever I need a car, one of my brothers always lets me take his, even though I have caused one or two (or more) scratch or dent in their cars :-) We’ve been each others chauffeur on so many occassions in the last 15 years. I would never refuse to pick them up or take them somewhere and neither would they. And none of us takes adavantage of the other in this regard.
Last Friday I agreed to pick up Bro2 and two of his female coworkers from a wedding party and to give the ladies a lift into their city, so they could take a taxi from there to their various neighbourhoods. It was just a very tiny detour from our direct way home. They called the taxi 15 minutes in advance from the highway, but the taxi didn’t show. 30 minutes and two more calls to the taxi dispatch (“A new taxi will be there in 5 minutes!”) later, there still was no taxi to pick them up. We couldn’t just leave them there waiting on their own, because it was a rather deserted street at the edge of the city. In the end we drove both of them home to their flats and from their back home to our town. Instead of getting home and into bed at 1.30 AM I was home and in bed 90 minutes later, at 3 AM.
I knew I would have to get up only 5 hours later, because I had to be at the new flat at 9 AM. I didn’t really care though. All the time, while we were waiting for that stupid stupid taxi and on the long drive to various suburbs and then back home, I wasn’t annoyed or frustrated or silently cursing Bro2 for asking me to pick him up in the first place. I was surprisingly relaxed and just thought: I’d like somebody else to do that for me too, if I ever got stranded somewhere in the middle of the night without any means to get home.
Even if no one ever will, at least I know that I did “pay it forward” that night and did something nice without thinking about getting “payed back” for it in any way or at any time. And I definitely didn’t expect the box of chocolate these two ladies sent me via Bro2 on Monday :-)