Do I Really Have Anything to Say?

While running this morning, I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, called The Moth. It’s a storytelling competition where anyone from a celebrity to a person off the street or from the audience tells a story for 5 or 10 minutes based on the theme for the night. Think poetry slam without the rhyme and interpretation requirements. Often times, these talks relate a pivotal point in the storyteller’s life; that watershed moment that made the difference in what they decided to do for a living, who they married, whether they helped someone in need, or how they reacted to adversity. The theme of today’s show was “Into the Wild”.

About halfway through, there was a story about a woman who had moved to a new town (St Louis, apparently her version of wild) and fell on hard times based on a confluence of events related to health, jobs, and the rest. At one point she related a scene where her child – who had just finished chemotherapy – wanted a small toy on the way out of a store. She had no money and couldn’t. The man stocking the shelves overheard this exchange and, though the child took it well and didn’t throw a tantrum (or maybe because he didn’t), he called the child over and allowed him to pick as many as he wanted. He expected nothing in return.

This incident gave her the strength to persevere through the rest of her time in St Louis; gave her the faith in her fellow man that things would eventually work out. In describing the man, she called him (inadvertently, I think) a “perfect stranger”. We’ve all thrown this term around like it’s nothing. It’s just someone you don’t know from a hole in the wall, right?

But examine it for a moment and it truly describes the man in this story. He was exactly what she needed at exactly the right time. He was more than just someone she didn’t know. He was the perfect person she didn’t know doing the perfect thing for that moment in her life. I can only hope that, at some point in my life, I, too will be someone’s perfect stranger.

Tags: Perfect Stranger, serendipity, service, The Moth