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Here's something worth remembering when it feels like your small kindness can't possibly matter against the scale of everything that's wrong: you will never know the effects of what you do.
As a coach, I have conversations with people on planes. I never see them again and have no idea what happened next. I travel all over the world, and my family will tell you, with a combination of pride and irritation, that I make friends everywhere. I constantly look for how to be the wind beneath the wings of people trying to fly.
When you show patience to the cranky gate agent, it might have been the moment that changed their week or made them kinder to the next person. Even if there was no effect on them, there was an impact on you.
When you change the temperature of a room, your family, or workplace, you aren't doing it to calculate the ROI (Return on Investment). You're doing it because it's who you've decided to be. You've made a choice.
When you do it and the next person does it, and on and on, it becomes a thing. You're not just refusing to become part of the problem; you are part of the solution. One person at a time.
That's the whole practice, the same one we've been talking about all summer. Small, deliberate choices about who you're going to be, made without needing to see where they land.
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