This one's on me. Sort of...

The last couple of days have been the roughest days of a rough month. All of this roughness had to do with a couple of projects at work. It was one of those situations where everyone is stressed out and a few people dropped the ball so I kept picking up slack and picking up slack until next thing I knew I was working until midnight and crawling home for five hours of sleep before crawling back to do it again. In addition, I admittedly have a problem with allowing my boundaries to be crossed when something urgent comes up at work. I found myself dropping all the healthy and mindful habits I had been developing because of this rush.

Yesterday I finally left on time. I went home and napped for a little while before getting up and going to the gym with Terry, a dear friend of mine. My brain was still so exhausted that it just wasn’t tracking like I needed it to. I wasn’t paying enough attention and tripped over an exercise machine and landed pretty hard on my shoulder and hip. Normally this wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but I just had hip-replacement surgery on that hip in October and dislocation is a risk until it is firmly healed in. It didn’t dislocate but I was shaken by the fall and went home. This morning I woke up still tired and sore from the fall. My brain kept saying to my body, “Okay… go! No? You don’t want to go? How about now? Please?!” Eventually I got out the door and into the sub-zero Minnesota winter morning. All in all it was one of those days where you survive instead of live.

In other words, it was the kind of day where you treat yourself to a latte.

And that is just what I did. I pulled up to the pickup window and was holding my card out to the barista only to be told that the gal in front of me had paid for my drink. I immediately said that I would like to pay for the person’s drink behind me as well. Then I started to think about it. Was this really even an act of kindness? So I pay for the person behind me and they get the person behind them and so on. It will end in one of two ways. Either there comes a point when there is no one else in the line so the last car gets a free drink by default, or someone decides they don’t want to keep going. Why? Selfishness? If that’s the case then the person who benefits from this little act is the least deserving, right?

Maybe not. My now caffeinated brain kept chugging along with it. Maybe the selfish are the ones to whom random acts of kindness would be the most meaningful. How could they make sense of it otherwise? So perhaps if that is how the chain ended it planted a seed of kindness in the recipient and they were the most in need of it. On the other hand, maybe a person who was struggling financially, but had been having a difficult time and just wanted a small treat to ease their day was given a gift. Either way, everyone in that line had a moment when they actually thought about the car behind them as having a driver. A driver who was a human being and liked Northern Light Mochas.