Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring big questions around what really matters to people. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week there is no podcast after a couple of interviews were postponed. Many are scheduled in the coming weeks so the normal flow will return from next week on. So this week I am sharing an experience that left me with an overwhelming feeling of this being a good life.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
There is a man in my local café whom I see almost every morning with his husband.
We are not close friends in that we don’t socialise outside of seeing each other in the café, but we greet warmly and will often share short funny encounters.
Before my daughter started Kita, he would see us there almost every morning.
He approached me one morning and asked in German if he could start taking photos of me and my daughter without us noticing. He had an idea and didn’t offer any more than that.
Knowing his general vibe, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
Over the following months he took pictures of us. Sometimes without us noticing. Sometimes with comical espionage behind the leaves of a banana plant. But mostly we didn’t notice.
Until one day, months after he had stopped taking photos of us, he approached me and my daughter in the café and presented a book.
It was filled with thoughtfully curated photos that covered several months of our morning ritual together.
He did it discreetly, without any fanfare.
He’s not a photographer, and there was no hook.
And I instantly welled up.
I went to make a fuss of him and his gesture but he really didn’t want that and he just went back to his seat.
When a woman in the neighbourhood heard me share this story, she mentioned that one day, after she and he had discussed a band she loved from her teens, he rang her doorbell months later and dropped off a t-shirt he created of the band.
Same again, little fanfare and off he walked into the sunset.
Some people, eh?
2. This Week’s Questions
Has anyone you didn’t expect anything from ever done something incredibly kind for you?
Have you ever done something incredibly generous for someone who is neither family nor a close friend?
About Me
I am a facilitator, coach and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.
Somebody should research the commonplace that good things happen to good people, and find out whether something magnetic or pheromonal draws certain people to one another.