Hello, friend! What you do matters! In this audio edition of the my bi-monthly newsletter I share a story of how small acts of kindness are not small. It's just a quick reminder that you hold tremendous power to change people's lives by the choices you make moment to moment.. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
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Speaker 1:
Hello friend, welcome to the audio version of the Vice Column newsletter. If you're like me, reading is a little bit slow for you, then this audio version is just to make your life a little bit easier or maybe allow you to listen while you're on the move. So forgive me for reading, but I want to make sure I tell you this story accurately. It's about the time I found myself sobbing in a New York City taxi cab and a few months earlier I had moved across the country to New York City from San Diego to do an internship and it was a big adjustment to get used to city life. There was winter weather, navigating a public transportation system which we don't have much of in San Diego and, most of all, living in a place where I didn't know anyone and didn't have any friends. But the biggest shock of it all was the job I took, because it was so different culturally from the culture of my family business that I had come from. So it was like night and day and really felt intimidating. On my first day on the job I was told to report to this woman who was going to be my boss and when I knocked on the door she kind of glanced up and said what? And that's how we met. And then I introduced myself and she just said I don't have time for this BS. But she used the real words and she said go, sit in office three. So that was kind of emblematic of how my experience was when I was at the bank and I was kind of shuffling around trying to stay busy. There's a lot of lessons I learned from it. I wish I'd had a little more perseverance to in the way I responded to that situation. But long story short, I wanted to be useful and prove myself to myself. I can make it and I gave the job a lot of power to dictate how I felt about myself and in retrospect I think, far more than it deserved. But at the time I felt like I jumped into the deep end and I was just sinking, sinking, sinking, sinking.
Speaker 1:
So the morning that I broke down in the Strangers Cab I was supposed to meet a team of analysts from the company and we were going to go to the train station and go to a very important meeting in Delaware and I had everyone's tickets. So that's a big point to the story. So I got to Grand Central Station, which is where I always left on the train to get to my job every day and I couldn't find the track number for my train to get to Delaware and so I was asking around. I finally got help at the Info Booth and they said no, this train is not leaving out of Grand Central, it's leaving out of Penn Station. And so I felt completely panicked because now I'm at the wrong train station. I have everyone's tickets. I'm already feeling like a failure at this job and, yeah, I just felt so flustered. So I ran out to the street and I got in a taxi cab and I asked the man to hurry. I said just get to Penn Station. The train was going to leave in about 15 minutes at that point.
Speaker 1:
So this man was a middle-aged man, he was wearing a big turban, he had a heavy accent and he kind of shrugged apologetically and he said there's no way we're getting there across town in 15 minutes during morning rush hour in New York City, which I probably should have known. But I was holding out hope. So as he said that to me, all the frustration and pressure I had put on myself, that had bottled up for the last couple of months, just came welling out and I just started sobbing hysterically in the back of this poor man's cab and he didn't know what to do. And he was just sitting there, kind of frozen, and he was watching me through his rear view mirror. Here's this 22-year-old girl in the back of his car losing it. And then, as I tried to compose myself, he took off his seatbelt and he reached across to the passenger seat where he had this tattered satchel and he pulled out this little brown lunch bag and he pulled out the apple from his lunch and in the little space between the plexiglass that separates the back seat from the front seat in a taxi cab, he handed me, you know, he turned around and got his arm through and handed me his apple and this man, who had come from a country so far from mine, who had no idea what it was like to be a 20-something on Wall Street it didn't know why I was upset had so much compassion for me that he wanted to comfort me. It almost makes me choke up even now. When he did that. It showed that he cared and I really didn't know what to do other than just kind of say thank you in a shocked way. But I felt so heart-warmed and I felt in that moment that even in that big, crowded, what was for me before that, a very lonely city run by these competitive people where I had felt just so isolated that there was humanity.
Speaker 1:
And I've been given many beautiful and generous gifts in my lifetime. My grandparents bought me a beautiful watch that's very special to me that when I turned 16, but among the most priceless things I've ever been given was that little red apple that he sacrificed from his lunch to give me, and I bet that, metaphorically, you've given many apples away, many more than you realize. You know. I'm sure there's times you flashed a smile at someone who was feeling a bit down, or you held the door for someone to show them that you care, just to do something a little bit nice. Maybe that person was feeling invisible that day and you made them feel seen. Or maybe you've given some, not maybe. I'm sure you've given some very sincere compliments to someone who walked a little bit taller afterwards because you took the time to share your words.
Speaker 1:
So I wanted to say keep it up. That's my message today. What you're doing matters Every day. The apples you give away are going to remind someone that there's kindness in the world. You're giving them an absolutely priceless treasure. That's it for today's email, and thank you for spending a little bit of time with me. I hope that you continue having a wonderful day Until next time. Bye.