A lot of the time, people are rushing towards some nebulous goal, thinking that surely their life will start when they finish university, get a better job, move, get married, and on and on it goes…
In reality, and sometimes quite unfortunately, life is happening all around us. All the time. If you stop and take in your surroundings, you’ll start seeing the small, but beautiful things.
Warm conversations, smiling people, leaves falling and crunching underfoot. Life never stops being beautiful, if you know where to look - even at funerals.
More info: Reddit
Being a delivery driver takes you to some unexpected places, but not even the most seasoned driver could have expected this one
Image credits: Norma Mortenson (not the actual photo)
An UberEats driver was invited to share his story about delivering to a funeral service and delivered, both literally and figuratively
Image credits: u/Piggybear87
Image credits: Marco Verch Professional Photographer (not the actual photo)
He assumed he was going to get a pretty good tip, so he took the order, got the food and rolled up to the address - a cemetery
Image credits: u/Piggybear87
Image credits: cottonbro studio (not the actual photo)
He was slightly unnerved when he asked a random attendee if they knew so-and-so and they pointed to the casket
Image credits: u/Piggybear87
Image credits: Brett Sayles (not the actual photo)
He was intercepted by the real recipient of the food, the husband of the wife that had recently passed away, as the delivery was their favorite anniversary dinner meal
Image credits: u/Piggybear87
The driver was touched by the husband's gesture and stayed with him to listen to his stories about his wife and finish the meal he "shared" with his loved one
I’m certain that very few delivery drivers have ever had the chance to deliver food to a funeral. I can totally understand the confusion when you’re rolling up to the place and see where you’ve arrived. Especially when it’s not a funeral home, but rather a straight up cemetery, as the original poster (OP) detailed.
It gets even weirder when you find out that your delivery is for the deceased. That would be enough to make me hang up the courier’s hat for good, unless it played out like in the poster’s story.
I say that, because the real reason the food was ordered is very touching. The husband of the recently departed wife used her account and ordered something very special.
According to the poster, the restaurant where he got the food is practically a historical site at this point, as it has been open for around 150 years. A place like that, holding out for so long, in this economy (cue angry man yelling at a cloud), has to have something very good about it.
And it seemingly does, as the old couple had chosen it as their anniversary location for 51 years. Unfortunately, for the 52nd year, the wife was with her husband no longer, but he refused to let the tradition perish.
He got their favorite dinner meals and got them delivered to the service. No longer does a cemetery delivery set off alarm bells, only… endearing bells, I guess?
If we’ve got red and green flags, I don’t see why we can’t have endearing bells.
Image credits: Sven Mieke (not the actual photo)
The following conversation by the casket about the senior gentleman’s wife, their life and experiences together seems to have shaken up the poster quite a bit. It made him see things differently, if only for a while. Oh, the moment was bittersweet for sure, but that’s what makes it even more touching - finding beauty and happiness in loss, despair, and memory.
Now, now, you may be getting your pitchforks out and screaming at your screen that such things or conversations don’t happen in real life, but sometimes life imitates art, as backwards as it sounds. Don’t forget that the weirdest things happen not on the movie screens or in books, but rather in life, where they are far more rare and obscure.
In his brief but very touching Medium article, Logan Haney talks about finding beauty in the small and simple, even everyday things, rather than endlessly marching towards that pie in the sky.
Some people meditate, others try to achieve flow states to be more attuned with their surroundings, Logan says. But he is trying to find the beauty in life in a very grassroots way.
He tries looking at things in a new way wherever he is, whether it’s a park or a subway. Logan looks for the tiny but appreciable details in things ranging from gargantuan architectural marvels to the pen in his hand.
If I had to describe this practice, it would probably be something like “looking at things as if they were totally new to you every time.”
As with any practice, the more you try to search for beauty, the simple and more obvious it becomes. Your perspective shifts, and what once seemed a total chaotic mess appears to have its own rules and modes of beauty that do not conform to what is the norm, but is nonetheless beautiful.
That would be my message to you, dear reader, to look at everything around you and appreciate things for what they are - amazing, improbable, intricate, simple, and at the end of the day, beautiful.
This story, posted on the UberEats Reddit community, of all places, was 97% upvoted, collecting a total of 5.3k upvotes. Out of nearly 400 comments, the overwhelming majority of them mentioned one simple thing - that the story made them cry.
Share your own improbable and beautiful stories down below, in the comment section!
Many, many commenters mentioned that they were getting very teary-eyed all of a sudden
