Reverse Shift #What We Can Do for the Future

On the station stairs, a woman walking in front of me fell and
spilled the entire contents of her bag.
Everyone around her just pretended not to see and walked on by.

For just a split second, I hesitated. 'Would it be meddlesome if I spoke to her?'
'What if she finds it annoying?'
Thoughts like that crossed my mind, but I couldn't just leave her be, so

I called out, 'Are you okay?'

She looked at me with a surprised expression, but immediately smiled and said, 'Thank you.'
That smile made me feel as if my own heart had been warmed and comforted.
I felt that way.

We don't know how much longer we will be able to live our lives with vitality.
Will my life just drag on like this, ending without me ever being able to change anything?

That kind of vague anxiety is always in the corner of my mind.
Because there are so many things where you can't see the results of your actions,
I'm afraid to take that first step.

When I think that way, I get tired of myself for being unable to resist these negative emotions.

But is that really the case?

It's nothing special. Calling out to someone who has fallen or
asking 'Are you okay?' to someone who seems to be in trouble
is surely something anyone can do.

Yet, we often overlook the small light
that exists within such simple actions.

Kindness directed at someone without expecting anything in return saves your own heart above all else.
After all, you never know what the other person is feeling. Even so, that act of caring for someone
left something certain within me.

It was a warm feeling, completely different from the lonely impatience I felt
when my head was filled only with my own concerns.

The future isn't something someone else will change dramatically for us.
The world isn't simple enough to be changed by one person alone.

I used to think that, but perhaps the future
starts to change little by little by reversing (flipping) the negative emotions within ourselves.

It doesn't have to be a grand achievement.
It doesn't have to be for the sake of being praised by others.
The deeply personal act of offering a little bit of kindness to someone
flips our hearts, and as those acts accumulate,
they eventually light a beacon of hope across society as a whole.
That is what I believe.

This small step is, in fact,
the action we ourselves can take for the future.