Complimentary Blessings.

I was in a charity shop today, moseying slowly between the aisles, when I noticed a young woman with a child in a buggy standing aside to let me pass. She was smiling at me expectantly, and she was so unprepossessing as to be remarkable for the fact.

She had relative poverty written all over her. Small in stature, so slim as to seem unnaturally so, devoid of prettiness or any vestige of make-up to disguise the fact, possessed of plain mousy hair and the plainest of clothes and spectacles, and probably not yet twenty. But the smile was warm and genuine.

I said ‘thank you’ and moved on, but encountered her again a few minutes later. She was still smiling at me, so I returned the smile and glanced down at the child. The little girl, who I guessed to be around fifteen months, was as unprepossessing as her mother, except for one particular. She raised her eyes to mine and I saw that they were large, open, intelligent, and coloured the most vivid shade of Wedgwood blue. I complimented them to her parent who smiled even more broadly still.

As I moved away it occurred to me that for a few moments I had probably made somebody with little in the way of material comforts proud and happy in her achievement. And for the same few moments I had the rare sense that maybe there's some point in my being here after all.