03-08-2025
The kindness of strangers: out of the blue, an older woman handed me a well-thumbed book
A couple of years ago, I decided to improve myself physically and mentally. I did that by setting a couple of new year's resolutions. One was to exercise regularly, and the other was to read a book a week. The exercise part didn't go so well because on 1 January, I went for my first walk and stepped on a branch that punctured my leg. But my plan to throw myself into reading was much more successful.
Later that year, I was on a long train trip from Sydney to Melbourne with a friend and told him about my reading goal. I was pretty stoked with how well I was going and was excited to talk about it. I didn't think this was particularly interesting chat to anyone else on the train, so I certainly wasn't worried about anyone eavesdropping.
But at some point on this journey, an older couple stood up to get off the train. As they walked past, the woman handed me a well-thumbed copy of The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. She smiled at me but didn't say anything.
Before I had time to process what had happened, she was gone. I didn't even get a chance to say thank you. That was our only interaction on the train and her gift was completely out of the blue, with no pretext and no expectation. It was a simple, quiet gesture of humanity – kindness just for the sake of it.
I didn't quite hit my goal of reading a book a week that year, instead maxing out at about 30 books for the year, which was still a lot more than I'd ever read before. But what makes the memory even fonder is that The Man Who Was Thursday went on to become one of my favourite books – it now has pride of place on my bookshelf. That woman on the train had great taste.
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