Be Kind To Everyone You Meet—You Never Know How They’ll Shape Your Life

You don’t know who’s about to enter your life. You don’t know what effect they’ll have on you, what monumental action they might commit, or what role they’ll play in your self-starring movie. You don’t know what their names are, what they look like, or where they come from. They are strangers passing by you in a grocery store, they are the cars behind and in front of you in the peak hour highway traffic, they are numbers in a phonebook that you’ve never even picked up. They are simply just people with plans.

Until one day, they’re not. They become teachers so memorable that inspire you tremendously or teachers so awfully traumatizing. Retail workers who give you kindness and a job when all you originally intended on leaving with was a swimsuit. University classmates who give you brutal, stinging feedback that ultimately become your best friends. Lifeguards who pull you out of rocky currents in the middle of a riptide. And suddenly, without intention, these people shape their own puzzle pieces into your life and you are unsure what things would be like without their presence in some form or timeline. You wonder how you ever lived a life before that person was in it, how the moments before them were completely and utterly a past and previous life, already lived.

It might be a serendipitous way of saying: be careful what you do and say to strangers, you never know who they might end up being. Don’t yell at the guy who took your parking spot, he could be your future boss. Be kind to the boy at the beach café, he could end up saving your life. It also might be a subtle prompt to consider the ways you impact other people’s lives, how you could instantly give someone a compliment that might alter the entire course of their life or scar them in a way that might haunt them forever. You can’t control the course of your relationships with every single person you meet, but you can always decide on which version of yourself to give to others.

Choose wisely, and bravely, and kindly.

Choose selflessly, selfishly, and constantly.