reader mail on lost wallets

From a Norwegian:

“I just wanted to say how much I agree with your point about finding the owners of lost wallets. It really does feel like a minor miracle — I lost my own wallet earlier this summer, and I wrote it off as completely lost and cancelled all the cards in it. The day after it turned out that someone had found it (A Polish guy, btw. He even told me he was drunk when he found it!) and contacted me on facebook!”

As stated earlier, it’s not just a nice thing to do, and the right one. It also allows for a very brief but nearly miraculous moment of human dialogue when you can appear briefly on the scene as a delivering angel. It’s not so much about the thrill of wearing an angel costume briefly (though there’s a bit of that) but of giving the other person some hope for the human species, and that’s always worth doing.