I just had the most amazing opportunity to feel good DOING good.
Waiting to meet a girlfriend for lunch, I had a few moments to spare so I popped into my least favorite store of all time to grab a couple of items and kill some time. Upon returning to my car, I notice a lovely ladies Gucci wallet under a shopping cart next to my car. There are no cars nearby so I pick it up and look inside...it looks like it is in tact - perhaps it fell out of some busy mom's handbag as she was getting back into her car to leave?! Seems likely...I could easily imagine that happening to ME and KNOW how upset I would have been!
My first thought was to take it inside and leave it with the customer service staff at my least favorite store of all time, but then I remembered their legendary incompetence and decided the wallet's owner fared a better chance with ME as its custodian. Feeling rather guilty for doing so, I poked through the pockets of the wallet looking for a phone number, any way to identify the owner...ANYTHING that would help me return it to her. All I could come up with was a driver's license, so I walked into the nearby FedEx/Kinkos office with the intent to have them box it up and ship it to her. However, upon further inspection of the driver's license, I notice that it was issued in 2005...what are the odds of this young woman living at the same address of five years ago? Hmmmm. I walked back to my car without shipping it. There had to be another way.
Just as guiltily as before, I once more rifled through it looking for more clues and noticed several credit cards and gift certificates bearing the name of a man. One card was a Platinum American Express Card bearing this man's name and a business name. Ah ha! I will call American Express and THEY will get the wallet and its contents back to the owner.... but then I think, what if I could FIND the business on my Blackberry's Google app. and then this man can return the wallet to her?!?! I Google the business name and voila! It is a local business about 3 blocks away and yes, the man is MARRIED to the young lady whose wallet I had found! BINGO!
I quickly drove the wallet over to his office where one of this young man's nice co-workers was absolutely stunned to receive this beautiful wallet, completely intact, merely hours after it was "lost." To make the story even sweeter, he tells me that the young couple had just gotten married the week before! Awwww!!! I hand it over with my business card and ask them to simply PAY IT FORWARD.
It feels really, really good to DO GOOD and to make someones life a little better or easier with a simple good deed. I wish for all of us SOME small opportunity to DO GOOD today, to make a difference, to ease someone else's journey, to restore a tiny bit of someone's faith in the goodness of humanity.
How will you FEEL GOOD by DOING GOOD today or in the next few days? Look for the opportunities...they are out there! :)
