The Cost Of Kindness
This past week, I spent some time traveling to Miami & Orlando, Florida. During this time, I had one moment from the trip that really inspired today’s blog post. Since there were not many ideas for other topics, I thought today I would share three anecdotes from my personal life that can probably teach everyone reading a lesson. A parable if you will. I think from the 21 years I have lived so far, I have realized that life is not fair, and it can be a cruel place sometimes. However I firmly believe that the way you interact and present yourself to others is what makes our world a beautiful place. Unfortunately kindness & people who will listen and are open to perspectives are truly a rarity in what I have found to be somewhat of a contentious environment. So I hope today’s blog post reminds everyone to treat people the way you want to be treated.
The Cost of Kindness
On my way out of Miami, I was on an uber heading towards Fort Lauderdale Airport which was roughly a 40 minute car ride from where I was staying. In the middle of this uber ride, I checked my email like any other normal day in my life. When the refresh had completed, I had noticed I had gotten an email from the airlines I was about to depart with. After clicking on the email, I was disappointed that my flight had been canceled. This was very problematic because I had to get to Orlando somehow as I would be departing from there to get back home to Boston. Another small dilemma I had was whether to tell my uber driver to stop driving me away from Miami itself. I decided to say nothing and tried to plan the next course of action first by checking all available flights that depart within 6 hours from the current time. I had found one quickly but it came out at a hefty sum, as buying a plane ticket the day of usually is upcharged compared to tickets that were bought in advance. The night before I had already gotten poor sleep because I had to wake up early for this flight so I was a little flared up which was a natural reaction. When I had arrived at Fort Lauderdale, I called the next uber to the Miami International Airport which would be roughly an hour from Fort Lauderdale. Since it was an hour out, the uber itself was also very pricey and this was slowly beginning to turn into a bad day.
When I got into my next uber, I was greeted by a kind man named Hugo. I was wearing a Miami Heat Basketball shirt that I had bought the night before and he had commented about my shirt which began a conversation about basketball. Hugo was very friendly and reminded me of who I strive to be, which is a super smiley, happy person. After concluding our conversation about Julius Randle’s game winner, I had told him that my flight had been canceled at Fort Lauderdale and told him why I was now heading to the other airport. Though he had zero involvement in my situation, he felt very remorseful and told me he would try to change the course of direction of my day. I had not had breakfast that morning and he offered to show me around Miami to go get some breakfast at no extra cost. At first I was hesitant because Uber automatically changes the fare based on the driver’s route but it is very hard for me to ever turn down an opportunity and I am so glad I ultimately didn’t. I told him a little about my story, how I was currently residing in Boston, working in biotech, graduated early, seeing the world, and he validated my decisions by telling me I was “living the dream”.
Oftentimes in life, we are presented with two diverging roads with choice A/B and once we pursue a choice/scenario, it totally changes the direction of our lives. However, being so young, while I tell myself I have no regrets, deep inside I sometimes stumble on some of the decisions I have made and ask myself if they were all worth it. So to hear Hugo tell me I was “living the dream” felt great in many ways. A stranger with no technical bias, had told me that my life was pretty cool. After sharing some of my background, I also heard about his background in which he told me about his academics, children, brother who is a professor at Northeastern, etc. The two of us got along very well as we got closer to downtown Miami. Once in Miami he started giving me a local tour and showed me around some of the places I had passed by on foot but never truly knew what everything was. We went through Brickell which is like the Wall Street of Miami with business men & pretty women, and slowly made our way towards little Havana where we would later on have a Colombian Breakfast.
In Little Havana, he took me to a local Columbian restaurant where he actually bought me Empanadas & Pandebono (Colombian Cheese bread). He also ordered me a cafe con leche (coffee with milk), and huevos, cayeye, cornbread, & calentado. Columbia is known to have good coffee and I do have to say that it was some of the best coffee I had ever had. Below I have pictured some of the breakfast (I forgot to take a picture of the main course >:( ):
During breakfast I asked him if he does this with all his uber clients and he told me… “No”. I was actually quite astonished because it showed that he really went out of his way to try and make my day better. And he told me his version of the golden rule. He told me that what he puts in now through the kindness of his heart will repay him in the future. I usually am rarely awed by strangers but the kind gesture truly transformed the events of my day. And I told him how crazy life is sometimes because if my flight didn’t get canceled, I would have never met him and was grateful that it eventually did get canceled. But thanks to Hugo, I was reminded that within the ugliness of the world, there is some light. Therefore at least for me, this experience really touched me and I want to treat everyone with kindness and continue to just be a good person to this world. So to the readers, there is no cost to kindness, and I encourage everyone to do good things not because they have to but because it could make someone’s day.
With that, this concludes this week’s blog. I hope some of this anecdote is heart-warming and helps you strive to live a better life. Thanks for reading this week’s blog!