Live your life with surplus.

The world was still asleep. The sky stretched in muted blues, the ocean barely stirring. The city hushed. I ran along the beach road, my feet falling into a quiet rhythm with the ground. Then I caught a moment. A small fragment of something larger. A hotel security guard, standing alone, reached into a tangle of green and plucked a purple flower. He bent carefully and placed it into the small, waiting hand of a toddler wobbling past. Her mother watched but said nothing. No cameras. No clapping. Just a moment of quiet kindness, offered without expectation.

Only I saw it, and it made me think. In the early steps of recovery, you are encouraged to do something selfless every day. Do not seek applause. Do not talk about it. Keep it to yourself. No validation. No borrowed light. Just an act, given and gone. The world will not know, but you will. And that is the point. To give without needing to be seen. To love without demanding proof. To live in the small spaces where goodness happens quietly, unnoticed, but still alive.

What struck me was not the gesture itself, but its cleanliness. There was no transaction. No hidden bid for approval. Just a man choosing who he was going to be in that moment. That is the part most of us miss. We are trained, subtly and relentlessly, to turn goodness into currency. Likes. Praise. Being perceived as decent. The ego steps in and asks for payment. The moment loses its force.

A life that gives without reward builds something sturdier. It shapes identity rather than image. When you act without witnesses, you answer a quieter question. Not who will see this, but who am I becoming. Those small, private choices accumulate. They form the architecture of self respect. Not the performative kind, but the kind that allows you to rest.

I fear that today most people are waiting to be noticed before they give. Waiting for the right audience, the right recognition, the right return. Meaning does not live there. It lives in repetition. In the unseen yes. In the unrecorded kindness. In the daily decision to add something decent to the world and then walk on.

That is how a life steadies itself. Not through applause, but through alignment. You know where you stand because you chose it, again and again, when no one was keeping score.

In that fleeting moment I saw that act of selfless giving, and it reminded me that I am here.

Where are you?