There was a handwritten card attached to the lid of the box. It read:
“Lockdown is hard! I hope this brings joy to you or someone you know. I’m not looking for publicity or acknowledgement, I just want to contribute to our community with this random act of kindness. Enjoy x”
I lifted the lid. Inside, planted securely in the middle of a soft black cushion was a gold ring, one end flat and wider than the rest of the ring, suggestive of the top of a nail, the other end thinner but not to the point of sharpness. The ring was open, its ends sliding past each other, overlapping, in a stylish, contemporary way.
The ring that someone left on a Sydney beach in a random act of kindness.
Back home, after some internet sleuthing I discovered that the ring in the little black box is “The Nailed It! Ring”, crafted in stainless steel and ion plated in 18k gold.
It is beautiful.
More beautiful, though, is the person who deliberately left it on a bench, motivated only by generosity and the desire to give another person a pleasant surprise.
In these hard times, when fear can make us respond too sharply to others, when we are sometimes too ready to blame or accuse or to dismiss the worries and problems of others as less important than or irrelevant to our own issues, such random acts of kindness remind us that there are people who are ruled by compassion, by good will towards others and by the desire to improve the lot of others.
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Such people give energy to the rest of us. They radiate light that lifts the surrounding gloom.
Thank you to that kind stranger for that most thoughtful gesture, wrapped up in a little box tied to a note. We got the message, just when we needed it.
Melissa Coburn is a freelance writer.
