The missing number

Imagine if one morning everyone will wake up with a number above their head. Not their age and not their bank balance and not their exam scores. A number showing how many people would genuinely miss them if they disappear.

No explanations and no way to hide it. Just a glowing floating number above every person. At first people would laugh and they would treat it like a game.

Celebs will be having some sort of competition about how much number they have and political leaders would convert their number to politics and influencers would make content about this.

But eventually the laughter would stop because the numbers would not actually mean what they think it means.

The school janitor who remembers every student's name would have more number than any famous person. The local tea seller who asks everyone how their day was may be the most important person of the town. An elderly women who always gives food that eh strays every day evening may be having a hundred numbers on her head.

The richest person may not necessarily have the largest number. Neither the most famous people.

Suddenly the social value would become to change. People would start to ask things like How many lufes have you been touched instead of How successfull you are.

And honestly I think a lot of us would be surprised by the number. We are thought to chase achievement and degree and promotion and money and status and followers. Yet some of the most unforgettable people I have met had none of these things.

What made them special was not what they owned but I was about how they made others believe and how they make other feel.

The teacher who believes in a student when nobody else did. The friend who stayed on the phone till 3 AM. The neighbour who always checked in. The stranger who offered kindness in a day when kindness felt impossible to find.

They may never appear on magazine covers. Nobody writes documentaries about them. History book would not rembrr their name.

Sometimes I wonder how many people have changed my life without realising it. The librarian who recommended the right book at the right time. The classmate who sat beside me when I felt alone and the people who have me encouragement when I was the one who was having a bad day. .

I doubt they remember those moments. I do. That is the strange thing about being human. We rarely know which actions become permenent memory for someone else.

A five minute conversation would stay with that person for years. A single compliment might arraive exactly when someone needs it the most. A small act of kindness might become the resone someone keeps going.

May be that is the reason I do not care about being remebered by everyone and I would rather be remembered by the few people who deeply care about me.

BC in the end our lives are not measured by how many people knows us. They are measured by how many people are glad they know us.