Empathy, kindness, and compassion have always been the quietest expressions of love and the people who still lead with them tend to carry happiness that outlasts almost everything else life throws at them. These 10 heartwarming stories from this week are proof that human connection and humanity are still very much alive.
1.
I’m a flight attendant and on Tuesday I had a passenger: an older woman, flying alone, clearly terrified of flying. I’ve seen it a thousand times.
I sat with her for the first 20 minutes after takeoff, just talking about where she was going, about her grandkids, about the city we’d just left. By the time we hit cruising altitude she had loosened up enough to eat something. When we landed she grabbed my hand and said “thank you” in a way that was more than just the flight.
2 hours later I got a message through the airline’s feedback system. It was from her daughter in Sydney who said her mother had been refusing to fly for 11 years since her husband died because he’d always held her hand on planes and she didn’t think she could do it without him.
This was her first flight since the funeral. She made it. I didn’t know any of that when I sat down next to her. I just saw someone who needed someone to talk to.