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2003-01-02
11:37 a.m.
The funniest thing happened today. I came into the office expecting to be overwhelmed with work, and, instead, I find myself sitting here relatively calmly with the new box of Swiss chocolate that was just given to me by one of the students I’ve been helping for the past semester. He’s been in France for several months and came back to the U.S. for a week or two. In two days, he heads back to France, and I just can’t get over the fact that this particular student decided to bring me Swiss chocolate.
Every once in a great, great while, I come across a pleasant surprise in life.
This is the sort of gesture that is so appreciated because it’s so unexpected and so completely random. I’ve been helping him, merely doing my job, what I’m paid to do, and he was so appreciative of my help that he brought me chocolate.
I love chocolate.
In a world where I am continually confronted by people who would do anything to make things just a little bit easier for themselves, it’s nice to see someone go out of their way to do something NICE for someone ELSE. I’m so impressed with the thoughtfulness of this guy. I’m flabbergasted. I almost don’t know how to respond to this completely foreign concept of niceness.
I’d almost forgotten that nice people exist.
I certainly don’t mean any disrespect to the people in my life who I know and love, and I wouldn’t even begin to say that Rob, my friends, and family don’t do nice things for me. That would be utterly ridiculous and unbelievably untrue. But it’s any entirely different thing when someone you don’t even really know does something nice for you.
These trivial little things mean so much to me. It’s unfortunate that these things don’t happen more often. Perhaps, if there were more people in the world who appreciated the help they get from an honest person just trying to do their job well, the world would be more tolerable. Perhaps, if people took a moment to thank you for the effort you put into their lives, it wouldn’t be so difficult to face humanity every day. Perhaps, if once in awhile you were given a nice box of Swiss chocolate completely out of the blue, life would be tolerable enough to continue living.
Life comes down to these moments of random Swiss chocolate gifts and the occasional perfect strawberry. The unfortunate thing is that so much else fills the years between those rare experiences of solitary bliss.
