By Maclay Cerny
Ever since I was little, it has been told to me to be kind to others. Help them out whenever you can; the kindness you show them will get repaid to you. Every day, I would make it my goal to try and do one nice thing, no matter how small, for someone. At the time, it would not seem like a big deal to me, but I got to see just how impactful small things can be.
When I was 12, I lived right next to a busy road, and behind our house was a lot of woods and a swamp. A few months before, me and my mom had just gotten a new puppy, Tipper. She is a beagle/walker mix, so she would always try to track animals into the woods. We had to be careful to keep her in the house or on a leash at all times.
One day when it was only my mom and me at the house, Tipper got out. She ran out the door when we were trying to shut it from bringing in groceries. At first she ran toward the road, so both my mom and I ran after her. We managed to chase her back toward the house, but then she went behind it and ran into the woods. Right about this time, my neighbor got home and saw everything that was happening.
While my mom and I were still trying and failing to catch Tipper, the neighbor had started calling our other close neighbors. We lived close to family also, so she was calling some of them too. Right when we thought that we would never catch Tipper, a bunch of cars started coming down our driveway.
It turned out that everyone my neighbor had called came to help us find her. We searched through the woods for about ten minutes before my grandma found her stuck on some tree branches. We got her free, and then everyone took turns carrying her back to my house. All of these people stopped everything they were doing to help us, and that allowed us to find her safely.
Today Tipper is almost eight, and she is as much as a member of the family as anyone else. If we had not been able to find her that day, my life would have been so different without her. There would have been no one to greet me every time I walk in the door and no one to cuddle with at the end of the day.
All the kindness that I had shown all my neighbors was repaid that day. It really proved to me that small things add up, and what you give to the world will be payed back to you. I still make a point to do acts of kindness whenever I can, hoping that one day when I am in need, I will once again come back around to me.
This I Believe: What Goes Around Comes Around
