Be the reason someone believes in goodness.

It had been the kind of week that makes you quietly wonder if the world is rigged against you. My mother had been diagnosed with something serious, a project I'd worked on for a year was killed in a Tuesday email, and someone had rear-ended my car in a parking lot and driven off. On Friday evening I walked out to the same battered car in the same lot, half-expecting a new dent, and instead found a yellow sticky note folded under the wiper.

My stomach dropped — another bill, another problem. I unfolded it. Six words, in careful blue ballpoint: 'I hope your day gets better. — A stranger.' No name. No number. No explanation. I stood in the parking lot and cried for a full minute, the kind of crying that is really relief pretending to be sadness. I have no idea who wrote it. Maybe they'd seen me sitting in the driver's seat with my head on the wheel earlier that week.

Maybe they wrote the same note for a dozen cars. It didn't matter. I taped that note to my desk lamp for three years. Whenever I began to suspect people were mostly awful, I looked at it and remembered: no, at least one of them, on that day, chose not to be.