Dan Harris

And she was everything you want that person to be in that moment, you know?

And it's COVID.

We're outside, but everyone's still wearing masks.

So I couldn't even see her face, just her eyes.

And she had the kindest eyes.

And as a mother, she knew exactly what I was feeling.

And she gave me all her love and kindness.

And I just felt it so profoundly.

It was such a gift to me in that moment.

And we exchanged holiday cards for a few years.

And I just, I love the opportunity to repeat that story because we all have the capacity to touch people in moments of crisis like that.

But in the most banal moments when you think a thing doesn't matter, like to reach out to a person from a place of compassion creates a story that that person might tell for decades, you know?

So that's my story.

That's beautiful.

That's really beautiful.

Just to put a sheen of...

psychological research on top of this, you know, there's been quite a bit of research into what the scientist Barbara Fredrickson calls micro-interactions.

And so we tend to move, I'll speak for myself as somebody who kind of wired as a frosty New Englander.

I, for much of my life, in fact, you know, I kind of wince a little bit with embarrassment to recall that you met me in

We met each other in 2006 because I was very much in this mode at that time of just hurtling through the world in a sort of self-centered, ambitious way and often really, frankly, rude to people.