I lost my passport a couple weeks ago (temporarily). Pretty terrifying experience. I was motorbiking in central Vietnam in a remote mountain area when a cord snapped and my small backpack with a lot of valuables (including my passport) fell off. I didn't notice for 15km. And when I drove back, I found the broken cord on the road but no backpack.
I spent the next few hours driving in a pretty negative headspace. Ironically, it was one of the most epic, beautiful drives I'd had in a month on a rare blue sky sunny day. And I was drowning in my own misery. I decided to pull over at one point to try and appreciate the insanely beautiful karst formations around me and accept reality vs resisting it with the nonstop "what-if" thoughts. And that's when I got a Facebook message request from Cornelia Fjelkestam, a Swedish backpacker. A local Vietnamese man saw her foreigner-filled bike crew roll up to a small local restaurant and handed her my passport. He had picked up my bag on the mountain and driven it to the nearest town 20km away. And turns out, she was headed to the city I was staying in that night and could return the entire bag (!!!). Amazeballs. AND, it was also her birthday. Double amazeballs. Funny what happens during moments of acceptance.
One aspect of this whole ordeal that really stood out was my automatic judgement that someone had selfishly taken my bag. With my newsfeed continuously dominated by the negative in this world, it's easy to develop subconscious reactions that always assumes the worst. Almost too easy. I consider myself a pretty optimistic person, and that default reaction is frightening.
There's a hellavu lot more acts of kindness for every "evil" act portrayed in the media today. They mostly go undocumented and unrecognized. And I could probably fill a whole book of that kindness I've experienced in the past 5 months traveling. Altruistic behavior is an expression of our most fundamental nature - that of connectedness. It is a transcendence of seeming separateness. It is the default, not the exception. And I'd like to actively remind myself of the pervasive existence of that behavior to break down years of conditioning that say otherwise
Altruism is Default Behavior