Yesterday was a bad day. It was one of those days where one bad thing happens right after another and never ends. When the first two bad things happen you think Sure, it’s just one of those days, on the fourth or fifth you think, Come on God, this must be a joke, on the seventh or eighth you’re on the verge of breaking and by the ninth or tenth you’ve finally snapped.

After I snapped it was 7pm and I sat alone on a chair in the city. There were many people and cars about but I felt little inside. I opened my bag to read a book, hoping it would cure my depression, and two oranges fell out onto the floor. One of the oranges rolled onto the ground two metres in front of me and the other orange disappeared from sight. I slowly went to pick up the orange I could see and looked around for the other one. I looked all around me but couldn’t find it. The orange had vanished. I sat back on my chair, defeated, on the verge of tears.

Then a man came up and said, Hey man, you dropped it there, and he pointed to the road. And there it was – my orange hiding behind the curb, underneath a parked car. I said, Oh, thank you, and went to pick it up and when it was in my hands I held the orange like it was my missing child. When I turned around the man was gone.

In that moment I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It was a very small act of kindness over a simple orange but the man’s actions had touched me. We were both strangers to each other and he probably had nice, interesting things to do on a Saturday evening yet he made the effort to help me in my moment of need. And in that simple gesture, all my day’s stresses and burdens quietly disappeared.

It is incorrect to call small acts of kindness small. Though they take minimal effort, these things that we do for each other – a smile on walking past, a Bless you on a frightful sneeze, a You first when lining up – make our interactions divine. They can be the rope that rescues one from the depths of insanity and the gates of hell.

It only takes a tiny star to illuminate a dark sky.

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“Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris:

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”

when someone sneezes, a leftover

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.

And sometimes, when you spill lemons

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”