Thank You Mr. Invisible >>>>I liked it

By: May Rostom


In life we meet people. People not very different than us. People that have been through hardships, laughed at the top of their lungs before, cried themselves to sleep one night, woke up one morning with a big smile on their face because they realized they're exactly where they want to be, and people that chose other people to share their lives with and be their saviors in their journey.


Some people we get to know like the back of our hands; their favorite color, their favorite food, deepest secrets, and their hopes for the future. Other people we get to know superficially by knowing their name, school, laughing with them at a joke or two, and greeting them nicely when we run into them at the club or the grocers'.


Then there are “The Invisibles”, they are people that are in our lives but we forget they exist.


The Invisibles know a lot about us, more than we know. They make our lives easier by smiling to us on the train when the world has turned its back on us, they help you with your luggage because they thought you might need a helping hand since you’re travelling alone, they're the ones that help you out when you're lost in the middle of nowhere asking for a simple set of directions, and of course the ones that get the door for you, take out your trash, mow your lawn, and fix your plumbing.


Although we don’t see them often- sometimes never again- we know they exist.


We can remember a few faces of "invisible" people in our lives, we definitely can remember a few gestures, and at some point we were the "invisibles" in someone else's life.


Don’t you just love the fact that you can influence someone so greatly without trying so hard? Here I am writing an article about a stranger I’ve met once in my life. I don't know where he’s from; I don't know what he does, or who he truly is, all I know is that when I was sitting alone at the airport, cold and tired, a total stranger came up to me holding a cup of coffee and welcoming me in a country that’s not even his own. I know you might be thinking he’s hitting on me, but that’s not really possible, he was there with his girlfriend/wife.


I can vaguely remember Mr. Invisible’s face, but his words were hard to forget. “Ms. You look exhausted, and it’s below 7 degrees outside so I thought you could use this cup of coffee”. It’s nice to influence someone, that day I got the feeling that I had to pay it forward somehow. I had to be that sweet for no good reason because someone would truly appreciate it. I had to put a smile on someone’s face not because it would make me more popular, but because I simply could. A selfless act was all I needed to influence a stranger on the subway, whether it was saving them a chair, smiling to them in the street, or helping a mother with her stroller down the stairs.


If you stop to think about it, maybe that’s what the world really needs. More invisibles, less friends.


After all, “kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see”- Mark Twain