Acts of Random… err… Kindness?

So there I was, shar­ing a won­der­ful din­ner with the recently "minted" Mrs. Back­ouris, her mum-in-law and Loni at the Fifty Forks restau­rant, at the Art Insti­tute of Orange County. I was shar­ing a story about some­thing ran­dom I began doing about a month ago. When I shared my story it had been brought to my atten­tion I hadn't said any­thing prior to my telling of this story. You see, I men­tioned to Long, a lit­tle over a month ago, that I wanted to take ran­dom, out of work-down on their luck, peo­ple out to lunch. I just didn't want to brag about it. There's noth­ing to brag about. I just hate eat­ing alone. =) I wasn't try­ing to accom­plish any­thing and I wasn't expect­ing any­thing out of this. I've been doing this a month and I've man­aged to take only one stranger out to lunch… I know, I know. It's a rous­ing rate of success.

Any­way, what I've been doing is just post­ing on Twit­ter and on Face­book, ask­ing, ran­domly, if some­one wanted to go out to lunch with me. The only require­ment I asked was that the per­son be unem­ployed. I'd meet them for lunch and pick up the tab. Easy. Well, peo­ple are weird. After some dis­turb­ing mes­sages from a user so-called "Ernest Morn­ing­wipe" I was wor­ried and slightly dis­turbed, yet I persisted.

That's when Jeff, an unem­ployed Civil Engi­neer, reached out to me and stated his desire to do lunch. He was a pretty nor­mal guy, save for this crazy han­dle bar mus­tache that he'd been grow­ing because, well, he had the time to grow it.

I imag­ine Jeff's story isn't too dif­fer­ent from a lot of peo­ple strug­gling in today's econ­omy, try­ing to make ends meet and sur­vive. Jeff's been unem­ployed for six months, but he had done a few inter­views on some recent leads he's got­ten from friends and for­mer colleagues.

Jeff remained cheer­ful and he was a really social guy. He thought it was odd that I'd invite some­one out to lunch and pay for it. We dis­cussed the "why" of it all. I didn't really have a good answer, as it was on a "just-because" whim, if you will.

He said, "Hey, that's cool with me, man. As long as you're not push­ing Sci­en­tol­ogy on me I will eat of some free fish tacos." We had a laugh about that one, before I asked him if he'd like a free "stress test." More laugh­ter followed.

He and I didn't have a lot in com­mon, really, but we both had a lot to talk about. He's engaged, but has had to put mar­riage plans on hold for the time being. It was inter­est­ing to here his story and how he's cop­ing. I think what really stuck with me was his atti­tude; he wasn't des­per­ate or down on life or him­self. He was sim­ply mak­ing sac­ri­fices where he could and just man­ages to keep plug­ging away and try to make things work.

You see, there's some­thing that I've been told, that I say to oth­ers because I believe it myself: "Things will work out because there's no other choice; they MUST work." That is, when we're pinned against a wall we still have to DO some­thing. I don't think I'm mak­ing sense, but all I'm try­ing to say is that things will work out in some way or other, per­haps not the way we'd like, but, in the end, things work out… Like it or not. Hav­ing that in mind has kept me sane when I'm stressed out. For Jeff, it just seems like he knows and I appre­ci­ate that attitude.