Against the Sound and Fury

Lying in bed the other night, listening to a storm, I found myself back in college.

Back with Macbeth.

Back with that terrible line about life being “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

At nineteen, or even at twenty-four as I was, fresh out of the Navy and finally in a college classroom, you hear a line like that one way. You underline it because it sounds important. You talk about ambition and despair and tragic flaws because that is what you are supposed to do in class.

But later in life, it lands differently.

By then, you have lived through enough sound and fury.

You have seen enough illness, loss, noise, anger, disappointment, and ordinary human foolishness to understand why Shakespeare gave those words to a man who had come to the end of himself.

Some nights, with the rain hard against the windows and the wind pushing at the house, it can feel as if the whole world is made of sound and fury.

But earlier that same day, I had been at physical therapy.

I was warming up on one of the bikes, doing what people do in physical therapy, which is pretending not to listen while hearing almost everything.

Behind me, three women were talking. One of them wanted another woman to tell a story she had told before. There was a new person there, and apparently this story needed to be heard again.

It was about a ring.

The woman had been in a store one day, just looking around. She was not there to buy anything. She was killing time, touching things she did not need, letting her eyes wander.

Then she saw a ring.

Not an expensive ring. Maybe thirty dollars. But she picked it up and liked it.

Sometimes a small thing catches us that way. A color. A shape. A little bit of shine. Something we had no intention of wanting suddenly looks like it belongs to us.

The clerk asked if she wanted to buy it.

The woman said no. She had not come in to buy anything. She did not have the money to spend on a ring that day anyway.

And then, out of nowhere, an older gentleman nearby said, “I want to buy the ring for you.”

Of course she protested.

No, thank you. That is too kind. I cannot let you do that.

All the things we say when kindness arrives too suddenly and we do not know where to put it.

But he did not make a speech. He did not turn it into a lesson. He just walked up, pulled out his credit card, paid for the ring, and handed it to her.

Then he said, “Have a wonderful day,” and left.

She never saw him before.

She never saw him again.

But she said she cried the rest of the day.

Not because of the ring, exactly.

Because she was in one of those places in life where she needed someone to be kind to her. She needed some small evidence that goodness still moved through the world.

And there it was.

A thirty-dollar ring.

A stranger.

A mercy she was still talking about years later in physical therapy.

That same day, after my appointment, I saw a man coming out with a walker. He was probably around my age. He was doing all right, but he was working at it.

Anyone who has had to learn a new way of moving knows that effort.

There is dignity in it.

There is also a lot of work.

He made his way to his car and started loading the walker inside.

I noticed the car because it was new and because I liked the color. It was one of those new grays that is not quite gray, not quite blue, not quite silver. A color that changes a little with the light.

So I said hello.

Then I said, “I really like your car. I love that color.”

His face changed.

He smiled a big, real smile.

He thanked me and told me it was a new color this year.

For a moment, he was not just a man trying to fold a walker into a car after physical therapy.

He was a man who had chosen a car he liked.

A man with taste.

A man with a new color this year.

A man someone had noticed.

It was such a small thing. I almost hate to make too much of it.

But maybe that is where we go wrong.

Maybe we keep looking for the large, dramatic forms of kindness and miss the quieter ones passing right in front of us.

Sometimes kindness is not the grand rescue.

Sometimes it is a thirty-dollar ring.

Sometimes it is noticing the color of a car while a man is loading a walker into the back seat.

Sometimes it is simply letting another person know they are more than their struggle.

The world is full of sound and fury. There is no denying that.

Turn on the news. Open the phone. Listen to people talk past each other. Watch how quickly we can become hard, certain, suspicious, and cruel.

But the world is also full of people holding onto the one thing that still reminds them they are alive, loved, mobile, remembered, or blessed.

A ring.

A car.

A stranger’s kindness.

A compliment in a parking lot.

A storm outside the window.

A line from Shakespeare that followed you from college into old age and still has enough force to wake something in you.

Maybe gratitude and kindness go together because gratitude softens the heart first.

It reminds us that we have received more than we earned, survived more than we understood, and been helped in ways we may never fully know.

And once you remember that, it becomes a little harder to be hard.

Gratitude notices.

Kindness responds.

Forrest might say they go together like peas and carrots.

Maybe he would be right.

Because Macbeth was not entirely wrong.

There is sound.

There is fury.

But there is also the small, stubborn music of people being good to one another for no reason except that goodness is still available.

And sometimes, that is enough to make a thirty-dollar ring shine for years.

Thank you for reading.

I’d love to know: Have you ever been on the receiving end of a small kindness that stayed with you much longer than expected? Or have you offered one and only later realized it may have mattered?