“That’ll be $3.75, please.” — “Wait, sir, here! Here’s three bucks. Just take care of the rest.” — “Oh, very kind,” I reply, as my unexpected benefactor gives me a smile and leaves. — “He’s a bit weird,” the clerk tells me. “He does this a lot.” — “Maybe so,” I said, and I wondered why.

This is a real exchange I had the other day as I was fetching my breakfast. I thought it was a nice gesture, and as I walked to my clinical day, I wondered why this man would regularly pay for others’ food, unsolicited. It’s not like I was under the impression that he was expecting a little something. He just left his money there, said “here you go”, and left. When I saw him sitting on the bench, he just smiled and gave me a fist bump as I walked by. There was nothing malicious about it. He just seemed like a happy guy, who enjoyed doing something small for someone else.

Moreover, I wondered why it would be considered “weird” for him to do so. I think this is the crux of the matter. I imagined what it would be like to work in that coffee shop and see this guy paying for strangers’ coffees and samosas every day. Who is he? Why’s he doing this when no one expects him to? Certainly, he would become the object of gossip since his actions violate the natural processes of the coffee shop: typically you enter, pay for your own order, and leave—that’s it! And when you put it like that, in fact, he begins to even sound like something of a legendary or mythical figure—a creature of fantasy that exists beyond the trifling norms of good and evil. What a strange man he is!

And then I had another thought, reminded as I was of other times I received the generosity of others. Some time ago, I’d had a long discussion with another patron at a pub, and while I thanked them for paying for my beer, they simply said that it was important to “pay it forward”, just as he was told when he was a grad student. So, I wondered what this coffee shop might look like if people paid it forward more. What if tomorrow I left another three dollars for someone else, and then they left three dollars for someone after them, and so on, ad infinitum? Wouldn’t that be a beautiful sight for those staff, who may have thought it strange, but who nonetheless must surely appreciate the kindness of other human beings?

Imagine: day after day, you serve patrons their coffee, and day after day you see one act of kindness after another. What a wholesome sense of community that must be! And what if were not just that coffee shop but the world where we could see those small acts of kindness between people? Would it make a difference? Do we dare make the effort, or is that too strange for us?