I didn’t really intend to write a blog post this week, but yesterday I had a two-minute chance encounter that made my day so I had to write about it.
I was coming out of my local Trader Joe’s supermarket when I heard a voice call out behind me. Turning around, I saw a man whom I didn’t recognise. He asked me if I had once been a member of Carmel Valley Athletic Club.
When I answered yes, he shook my hand and said he knew he had recognised me, and that he thought about me all the time. It’s worth noting here that I have not been a member of CVAC for over ten years, so needless to say I was intrigued.
He went on to recount that one evening we had been having a conversation at the club and I had told him that “there’s no such thing as bad weather, there’s only the wrong clothes”. He said that this notion had stuck with him, and that he now used the phrase all the time himself.
I thought that it was absolutely brilliant that something I said had made such an impression on him that he had remembered it, and me, all these years. I told him so and thanked him for letting me know, and we both went on our respective ways.
I have to confess at this point that this particular nugget of wisdom is not original to me. I heard it from Billy Connolly many years ago, and in fact it isn’t even original to him; in his routine, he recalls hearing it from an elderly fisherman in Scotland.
Here’s the thing that struck me about this encounter yesterday. Many years ago, someone said this little aphorism to Billy Connolly, encapsulating so neatly the notion that so much in life is down to perspective. It impressed him so much that years later he incorporated it into one of his comedy routines. I heard a recording of this routine during the 1990s and the same thing happened to me – that pithy little phrase made me laugh and it changed my perspective. It stuck in my mind and I found myself occasionally passing it on to others. Now here I was witnessing the effect of passing on that small piece of wisdom, that it had made an impression on someone else and that now they used it. Just a little piece of light-hearted wisdom, being passed along from person to person over the years.
It’s amazing to think, isn’t it, how sometimes the smallest things can have outsize effects, how a chance remark can be so memorable, and how people can remember us when we least expect they would.
There’s a big lesson in that for me, I know. I think there might even be a big lesson there for all of us.
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