It Takes So Little to Do So Much — Whether We See It or Not

Every morning when I take my kids to the bus stop, I lament the fact that our eight-year-old neighbor girl has failed to deliver on the French toast I’ve been craving — the French toast I’ve been only half-jokingly begging her to bring me ever since the cold winter began.

“Do you have my French toast today?” I tease almost every time we gather.

“No,” she says matter-of-factly … or a little more vocally, depending on her mood. And on how annoying I am.

“Aww,” I reply. “How can you forget?”

“I don’t forget,” she counters. “You just don’t eat French toast at the bus stop.”

Well, yeah, if you’re going to be all technical about it.

The other day I went to the stop in a crummy mood. My beautiful wife and I had struggled over a miscommunication, and while we are becoming increasingly skilled at stemming the potential for conflict, I was still in the midst of trying to calm down.

As my two kids and I crossed the quiet street in relative darkness, I saw our little neighbor girl in the distance, waiting with her dad near the corner where the bus would pull up minutes hence.

She was holding something in her hands.

It was a plate.

With three hot pieces of French toast on it.

Slathered in syrup.

And accompanied by a plastic fork and knife.

Breakfast was served, right then and there at the corner of 38th Street and 11th Avenue. And just like that, a morning that had been headed south was rerouted northward.

“Bless you!” I said to my French (toast) connection.

And then, thinking quickly: “Gee. I sure could use fifty grand right now.”

Hey, a guy’s gotta try.

It’s amazing how significant the smallest of gestures can be. A few weeks ago I went running at the YMCA. I go three miles on a small, oval-shaped track that measures 18 laps to a mile. I feel like a rat as I run around in circles — er, ovals. It’s hard to stay focused sometimes when the same scenery goes by again and again and again and again.

The track’s only redeeming value is that it beats the hell out of the treadmill, which, for me, a child of the seventies, tends to conjure up bad memories of George Jetson: “Jane! Stop this crazy thing! Jane!”

I do pretty well running on the track, all things considered, and I push hard to go as fast as I can the last two laps — which leaves me winded and gasping as I cross the finish line, right by the desk where a Y volunteer folds towels and hands them out to sweaty people like me.

On this particular day, as I bent over after my run, hands on knees, half walking and half catching my breath (with a dash of praying not to die thrown in), the older man who was volunteering that day — a guy I’ve never officially met and that I’ve spoken to only in passing — walked by me and said, simply but firmly: “Good job.”

And just like that, a morning that had been going in circles — er, ovals — straightened out.

It takes so little to make someone’s day, someone’s minute, even someone’s week. We have no idea how far our routine smiles and hellos go, or how much impact we have on someone by holding the door for them at the coffee shop. My wife will often melt if I simply pull her close and hold her head in my hand; you can actually see, and feel, her entire body relax. It takes only seconds, and I don’t have to say a word.

The philosopher Plato is credited with once saying:

“Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

So true. Sometimes we see these struggles playing out right before our eyes. At the grocery store this morning I completed an intensive Greek yogurt evaluation standing next to a woman wearing a handkerchief on her head and carrying a chemotherapy dispenser in her backpack. Surely she is fighting a hard battle. But so was everyone else at the store, customers and employees alike. And so am I. And so are you, whether your struggle is overt or not.

We think we have to go big to have a big impact on someone. But the truth is that small is plenty powerful.

The neighbor girl who fed me? Well, I told her she made my day, but she doesn’t have any real sense of the lasting effect she had on me. The guy at the Y? He’s completely in the dark too. He has no idea how much he mattered in that moment in time, because I didn’t figure it out myself until several minutes later. And I didn’t bother to go back and tell him.

Little kindnesses go a deceptively long way. Sometimes you’ll see the impact, usually you won’t.

But it’s always there.

Peter Vogt

I’m a writer. An essayist, to be more exact. I tell stories here—true stories, from my own life, in hopes they will make a positive difference in yours.

I share laughs and tears, insights and observations, frustrations and realizations, relying all the while on the storytelling wisdom of Julia Cameron, author of The Right to Write.

It is a great paradox that the more personal, focused, and specific your writing becomes, the more universally it communicates.