PAY IT FORWARD (AND LEAVE A TIP)

I’m standing in line at my favorite takeout restaurant, waiting to pay for my order. As I turn my head to look around for a minute, a young girl about 16 or 17, slips in front of me and orders an iced tea. I roll my eyes and sigh, a bit irritated by this minor breach of etiquette. After the salesperson brings her drink, the teenager hands her a credit card. "We don't take credit cards for orders under $10," the woman says, so the girl starts looking through her purse and discovers she doesn't have any cash. At this point, I'm about to say something rude.

But suddenly, it occurs to me that I don't have to play it that way. Instead, I say to the cashier, "just put it on my bill."

The girl turns to me, "oh no, that's OK."

I look back at her, "it's alright, it's on me." For an instant, I see a look on her face somewhere between surprise and suspicion, which quickly changes to gratitude when she realizes that it's just a small gesture of kindness, no strings attached.

She smiles, "thank you so much."

"No problem, just do the same for someone else sometime."

She looks me in the eye, "I will. For sure."

I pay my bill and leave. This whole encounter has lasted maybe thirty seconds, if even that. It wasn't a big deal in any sense, but it got me thinking. Who benefited more from that exchange, the girl with a free drink or me with the satisfaction of doing a simple good deed?

As I walked back to my car, the phrase "Pay It Forward" came to mind. This was the name of a best-selling novel published in 2000, which later became a movie. The basic premise of the story is that anyone can make a difference in someone else's life and it all starts with doing a favor for another person-- without any expectation of being paid back.

In the book, a sixth grade class is given an assignment by their teacher. He asks the students to "think of an idea for world change and put it into action." Trevor, a 12 year-old boy, comes up with this concept: "I do something real good for three people. And when they ask how they can pay it back, I say they have to Pay It Forward to three more people. Each. So nine people get helped. Then those people do twenty-seven. Then it sort of spreads out to eighty-one. Then two hundred forty-three. Then seven hundred twenty-nine. Then two thousand, one hundred eighty-seven. See how big it gets?"

After my encounter at the restaurant, I started thinking about this and realized that extending myself to strangers is something I actually enjoy and often do without thinking. I don't mean I'm some kind of Father Theresa, but there’s something innately satisfying about trusting your best instincts and intentions. Even the smallest acts of benevolence and generosity reward both the giver and receiver.

Looking back over the past week, I tried to think of two other experiences that would qualify for PIF. A few days earlier, I was driving to a meeting in San Francisco and stopped at a red light, when I noticed a man standing on the traffic island a few cars ahead with a sign that simply read, "Hungry." I'd just been to a coffee shop and had a fresh pumpkin muffin on the seat next to me. When the light changed, I moved up, put down my window and handed the bag to him, knowing that muffin had just found a better home than my stomach. "Thank you, brother," I heard him say as I drove off.

I was in a deli a few days later (there seems to be a consistent food angle here) and a woman comes in the door holding a little baby in one arm and trying to maneuver one of those huge strollers that look like infant Hummers with the other. I walked over to her and said, "would you like me to park that by a table for you?" She shot me a grateful look and replied, "thanks, I am so tired." Now, if you're a parent, you remember what it was like to suffer from sleep deprivation and it's an unwritten rule that you always help another new parent whenever you can. I just hope she drives her car better than that stroller.

Here are three small actions that took minimal time, thought and effort, yet each had a positive effect on someone else’s day. And the fact is that these kinds of opportunities present themselves all the time. Think about what life would be like if we simply returned small favors by looking for three other people to pay it forward to. If you do the math, the numbers multiply pretty darn fast.

I asked my daughter, who is also a sixth grader, to continue running the figures given by the boy in the book (somehow, she’s ended up being a math whiz, having recently memorized 260 digits of Pi, while I can’t remember what I had for breakfast). Three to the tenth power equals roughly 59,000 people and to the fifteenth, 14 million, to the twentieth, over 3.4 billion. That means if we were to set off this little chain reaction, its impact would eventually reach across the entire planet. Will people giving selflessly to others end war, poverty and global warming? Hard to say, but when an irresistible energy meets an unmovable object, something has to give.

So I encourage you to have a little fun playing Pay It Forward for a week. That momentary spark of connection, the shared sense of humanity, the simple exchange of good will between strangers, is a wonderfully affirming sensation. And while the old adage is "what goes around, comes around," the important thing is that it goes around.

As I left the restaurant that day, I saw my teenage acquaintance sipping her iced tea at a table outside. She didn't say anything and that's OK, the moment had passed. Besides, I knew what the real value of that random act of kindness had been. The iced tea cost me two bucks, the look on her face was priceless.