Don’t Throwaway Smiles



This bag of coins was more than half full before I took this picture. They’re coins from all around the world, and Kevin wanted to throw them away.

Why?

He thought it was much better to throw them in the trash than to try to figure out what to do with them.

You see we’re not all about materialistic things. In fact, we’re in the process of becoming minimalist—to only keep the things that serve us or has a sentimental value.

So I understood where he was coming from. The coins had no value to us. However, I took the bag from him and stashed it in the drawer of my desk.

“You’re not throwing away smiles,” I told him.

What I meant by that was if a kid found some of those coins on the ground, he or she would smile, thinking it was cool. I remember as a child finding loose change in the grass, and it most certainly made me smile.

Last Friday night, Kevin and I took a walk around our town. At the beginning of our walk, he tossed something on the ground. I turned to see what it was, and he told me not to look, to keep walking. I then realized he just dropped one of those coins on the ground.

I had totally forgotten I was going to do that, but he didn’t and took it upon himself to hand out smiles. I then asked him to give me some, and he did. We strolled through the park where there were kids playing and covertly released coins throughout the playground.

“This is fun,” Kevin said to me. “I’m glad you kept these coins.”

It was fun, and then on Saturday night, we finished tossing the rest of the change around town where we knew kids would find them.


This afternoon, we took another walk around town (we love to walk) and saw an adult male with a metal detector in the park we dropped the coins at. We couldn’t help but laugh and smile, thinking we might have created some gossip around our small town (this town loves to gossip) that would be centered on the mysterious worldly coins. So the smiles those coins created weren’t only reserved for the children like I thought, they were for everyone, including ourselves.  

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