Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: kindness

  • Tip Well

    Tip well
    Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash

    # 9 on my, 99 Life Tips – A List is: Be kind to waiters, waitresses, and service personnel. By kind, I mean, tip well. They are human beings doing a tough job. If you’re comfortable with it, ask for a first name, I do.

    You can tell a lot about a person by how well he treats those he’s not obligated or necessarily expected to treat with courtesy, respect, and dignity. I cringe and get angry when I see weak, insecure people act demeaning and degrading towards servers and other persons they consider beneath them. People who are compensating for their own powerlessness should just stay home. Others, aren’t so cringeworthy, they’re just cheap. They may treat others decently, but forget that they survive on tips.

    And courtesy, respect, and dignity – as valuable as those are – won’t buy groceries, or pay bills.

    So, when a tip is called for; in a restaurant, in a hotel, with other service personnel, enlarge your perspective to imagine yourself in their position and treat them the way you’d want to be treated. The pay is well below minimum wage in many of these industries with the expectation that tips will make up the difference. So, if someone does even an average job, pay them for it. They served you directly. Pay them directly. Easy. Think of how different your experience would be if that service worker wasn’t there. In many ways, they make the experience possible. In that light, reward their efforts.

    If you feel the need to teach them a lesson about the virtue and character that accrues from doing low-paying hard work, include a lesson about human kindness and generosity…yours.

  • He Hears

    My oldest son, Simeon, is 23 today.

    I caught him, slippery, broad-shouldered and born in the veil, on a cool, cool morning in 1998. I had trimmed my nails close in anticipation of playing the role of midwife again, so when he was born shrink-wrapped in the caul, the amniotic sac completely intact around his little body, I couldn’t get a purchase with my fingertips to tear it.

    Fortunately, Lisa was there with her fingernails and did the trick, opening the package of the amazing gift he has been from that moment up to the moment I sit writing this.

    He is a good kid.

    When he was younger, he learned to ice skate at the old rink where Eastland Mall used to stand. We fell in love with hockey from some other dad’s and kids that skated there, and it wasn’t long before he began to play. 

    He is a fantastic skater, built with a low center of gravity and powerful legs and he developed a wicked wrist shot at a young age. 

    But…hockey rewards aggression. My oldest son is not aggressive. He is the kindest kid of all my seven. He is quite literally the second kindest person I know, behind only Beth-The-Kindhearted herself. He is so kind that in games playing travel hockey on a team with the best players of his birth year, when he would score on an opposing goalie, he would never show off with a big celebration. Often, he would tap the goalie’s pads with his stick and encourage him!

    ”You’ll get the next one,” he would say, not wanting the kid to feel bad.

    And he’s wise for his 23 years; the living, breathing demonstration of what people mean when they talk about an old soul. I think those two qualities are inseparably linked. His wisdom is born out of his kindness. In Hebrew, his name means, ”He Hears”, and he does, he really does. He hears with compassion and empathy. 

    Can you tell I’m proud?