25 Uplifting Stories That Will Restore Your Faith in People

The smell of lamb soup came over the wall, and a poor man stood in it and ate his dry bread. He held each mouthful in the steam a moment first. The innkeeper saw him from the doorway, wiped his hands on his apron, and came out into the street. You have been taking my soup, he said. I have eaten nothing but bread, said the poor man, and held up the crust to prove it. You took the smell. The smell is mine. I paid for the lamb and the onions and the wood for the fire.

Pay me. The poor man had four small coins in his sash and no wish to lose them. A crowd gathered, the way crowds do. Somebody ran for Nasruddin, who was sitting as judge that week, and he came with his sleeves pushed back and heard both men out without once interrupting. He nodded slowly. The innkeeper is right, he said. A man must be paid for what he sells. The innkeeper folded his arms and smiled around at the crowd. Give me your coins, Nasruddin said to the poor man.

He took the four coins, cupped them in both hands, and shook them hard beside the innkeeper's ear. He shook them a second time. They rang like a little bell. Then he tipped them back into the poor man's palm. You sold him the smell of the soup, said Nasruddin. He has paid you with the sound of the money.

A mouse ran over the lion's paw, and the paw closed. The lion opened one eye. He was in no hurry. The mouse hung in the air by her tail and talked very fast, promising that if she were let go she would one day pay the favor back.

The lion laughed until his ribs shook the ground. The idea of a mouse helping him was the best thing that had happened all week, and he opened his fingers and let the small thing drop and run. The hunters came in the autumn with ropes. They took him at dusk near the water hole, and by morning he was lashed to a young tree, knots at his shoulders and knots at his back legs, roaring until the birds left the valley. The mouse heard him from three fields away. She came through the grass, up the trunk, and out along the rope.

She said nothing about promises. She started on the strand nearest his shoulder and chewed, and her jaw ached, and she chewed, and the strand gave, and she moved on to the next one. It took most of the morning.

The lion held still the whole time, which for a lion is the hardest work there is. When the last rope frayed through he stood up and shook himself and looked down for her. She was already walking home.

The threshing was done and the moon was up over the two barns. Two brothers had split their father's field along the ridge, share and share alike, and that evening each had carried his grain home and stacked it. The older brother lay awake. He had a wife and four children. His brother had nobody.

When I am old, he thought, my sons will feed me and mend my roof. He will have only what is in that barn. It is not right that we took the same. So he got up, filled a sack, carried it over the ridge in the dark, and set it quietly on his brother's pile. The younger brother lay awake too. I have one mouth to feed, he thought, and he has six, and a leaking roof, and a daughter who will want a wedding.

It is not right that we took the same. He got up, filled a sack, and started over the ridge. In the morning each man went out to count his grain and found the pile exactly as he had left it. Neither of them said a word about it. The next night they both went again, and the night after that. On the third night the moon was very bright, and they met at the top of the ridge, each with a sack on his shoulder. They stood there a while. Then they set the sacks down in the grass.

The thief searched the hut twice. One iron pot. A sleeping mat rolled against the wall.

A stack of paper with poems on it. Nothing a man could carry down the hill and sell. Ryokan, who was a Zen monk and owned exactly those things, came back from the mountain while the thief was still standing in the middle of the floor working out whether to be angry. You have come a long way, said Ryokan, and up a bad path in the dark. You should not go home with nothing. He untied his robe and held it out. The thief looked at him.

He looked at the robe, which was worn but good, and worth a few days of rice. The old man kept holding it out, and did not seem likely to stop, so at last the thief took it, tucked it under his arm, and went off down the track without saying anything at all. Ryokan sat down on the step in his undershirt. The night had gone cold and very clear.

The valley below him had put its lamps out one by one, and over the ridge the moon was coming up full and yellow behind the pines, and he sat there with his arms around his knees and watched it climb. Poor fellow, he said. I wish I could have given him this moon.

Anansi the spider went around the world with a clay pot and collected all the wisdom there was. Every clever answer. Every knot. Every way of telling when rain is coming and when a stranger is lying.

He scraped it all up, packed it in the pot, and sealed the top with wax. In the old Ashanti tales Anansi is never satisfied, and he was not satisfied now. Somebody would come and steal it. He decided to hide the pot in the crown of the tallest tree in the forest. He tied it against his chest and started to climb. The pot was in his way at once.

It knocked his knees. It pushed his body off the trunk. After an hour of scrabbling he had gone the height of a man and no higher. His young son had followed him and was watching from the roots. Father, said the boy. It would go easier if you tied the pot on your back. Anansi stopped.

He hung there, halfway up nothing, holding every scrap of wisdom in the world against his chest, and he thought about that for a long moment. Then he cut the rope and let the pot fall. It burst on the roots and the wisdom went up in the wind and blew out over the forest and the rivers and the towns, and settled into everybody, a small piece each. Which is how it is now.

The smoke came over the ridge before the noise did. Then the noise arrived, a sound like a river running the wrong way, and the forest was burning. Everything that could run, ran. Deer and pigs and monkeys, the snakes pouring out of the rocks, the tapir crashing through the low branches, the jaguar last and unhurried. They crossed the water and stood in the shallows on the far bank with the ash coming down on them and watched their forest go up. One small bird did not stand and watch.

The hummingbird went to the river, took a single drop of water in her beak, flew back over the flames, and let it fall. Then she turned around and went for another. The animals watched her cross, and cross back, and cross again. A drop. A drop.

A drop. The armadillo asked if she had lost her mind. The monkeys laughed the way monkeys laugh when they are frightened. At last the jaguar called out to her. What do you think you are doing. The fire is bigger than the whole valley.

You are carrying one drop of water in your beak. The hummingbird did not stop and she did not turn her head. She came back low over the river, past the jaguar's ear, going the other way with her beak full. I am doing what I can, she said.

The tea master had never held a sword in his life. He was wearing two of them through the town because his lord had told him to, and a samurai in the street had taken offense at the sight of a man dressed as a fighter who plainly was not one. Words were said.

A meeting was fixed for dawn. That evening the tea master went to a fencing school and asked the master there to teach him how to die well. The fencing master asked him what he did for a living. I make tea. Then make me some tea, said the fencing master. The tea master forgot the morning entirely. He warmed the bowl. He measured the powder.

He whisked, and set the bowl down, and turned it, and every movement was the movement of a man doing the one thing he had loved all his life, quietly, in order, with nothing else in his head. The fencing master drank it and put the bowl down. You need no lesson from me. Tomorrow, stand as you stood just now. Raise your sword above your head and wait, and while you wait, think about the tea. At dawn the tea master set his feet, lifted the blade, shut his mouth, and waited with his whole attention. The samurai faced him for a long moment.

Then he lowered his sword, bowed, apologized, and went away.

An old man dropped a mitten in the snow and walked on without noticing. A mouse found it. Wool inside, out of the wind, room to stretch. Very good indeed. A frog came hopping along the track. Who is in the mitten? Mouse.

Get in. Then a rabbit came, and after the rabbit a fox, and each one asked and each one climbed in, and the wool stretched and held. It was warm now, and crowded, and nobody complained, because nobody wanted to be the one who complained and got put out in the snow. Then the bear. Everyone went very quiet. The bear said he would take only a small corner. There is no corner left, said the fox. Take me in anyway, said the bear, and he began to push. The wool creaked.

Paws came out through the seams. The mitten swelled up like a loaf rising. That was the moment the old man's dog came back along the track looking for him, and saw an enormous walking mitten in the snow, and began to bark. Out they all came in every direction at once, mouse and frog and rabbit and fox and bear, and the dog chased after them until the woods were quiet again. The old man came back for his mitten and picked it up. It was stretched right out of shape. It was also still warm.

For seven years the poet Finnegas had fished the same brown pool on the Boyne. He was after one fish. The Salmon of Knowledge, which the Irish stories promise will hand over everything it knows to whoever tastes it first. He had a boy with him that summer, a quick lad called Fionn who fetched the water, kept the fire in, and asked far too many questions. In August the line went tight.

Finnegas brought the salmon up the bank and stood over it out of breath, an old man with wet sleeves and the thing he had wanted his whole life lying in the grass at his feet. He was too spent to cook it. Put it on the fire, he told Fionn, and do not eat one bite of it. The boy turned it over the flames. A blister rose on the skin and he pressed it flat with his thumb, and the burn was so quick and so hot that the thumb was in his mouth before he had decided anything at all. He carried the fish to the old man on a board. Finnegas looked at his face for a long time. Did you eat any of it. No. Did anything at all pass your lips. The boy told him about the thumb. The old man sat down slowly on a stone.

Then he pushed the board back across the grass. Eat it, he said. All of it.

It was never mine.

The scorpion was going around in the current with its legs in the air, and the old man knelt on the flat stone and scooped it out with both hands. It stung him on the palm as it came up. He jerked back.

It dropped into the water again. He reached in a second time. It stung him a second time. Again it fell. A young man had stopped on the path above to watch this.

On the fourth try, with the old man's hand already swelling and going the color of a plum, he could not hold his tongue any longer. Why do you keep doing that. It stings you every single time. Because that is what it does, said the old man, and reached in again. This time he got his fingers underneath it, lifted it clear of the water, and set it down on the warm stone. It sat a moment, working its claws.

Then it ran off into the grass without any sort of backward look. His hand was fat and red to the wrist. He rinsed it in the river, shook it dry, picked up his bundle, and went on up the path. The young man walked beside him for a while, saying nothing, and then turned back and stood a long time at the edge of the water, looking in.

The doors were already closing when Marcus put his hand on the lever and opened them again. A woman was still forty feet back, running in work shoes with a toddler on her hip and a plastic bag of nappies swinging off her wrist. She was not going to make it in the eleven seconds the schedule allowed him. He shut the doors, put the brake on, and stood up. Then he got off the bus.

He walked back and took the bag from her so she could run properly. She got on. He got on. Somebody near the front said something about the time. Marcus said the 8:14 was the 8:14 whenever he said it was, and pulled out into traffic.

The woman found a seat and sat there breathing hard with her kid staring at everyone. When she got off six stops later she tried to say thank you and her voice came out wrong, too loud, cracked in the middle. Marcus was already watching the mirror for the next stop. He said see you tomorrow. She was there the next morning with eight minutes to spare, and she did not need him to wait, and he waited anyway with the doors open until she was up the step.

He came in every Tuesday and found something wrong. The bread was stale. The bags were flimsy. The price on the yoghurt was different on the shelf than on the till, which it was not, and Priya checked it every time anyway. Six months of this.

Other staff swapped shifts to avoid him. Then one Tuesday he came in and stood in the aisle with a tin of soup in each hand and did not move for a long time. Priya went over. He said he could not remember which one his wife liked. He said she had died in March.

Priya asked what he usually bought. They stood there and worked it out from what was left in his cupboard, tomato, not oxtail, and she walked him to the till and put it through herself. The next Tuesday he complained about the trolleys. She said the trolleys were terrible, and he looked at her sideways to see if she was taking the mickey. She was, a bit.

He came back Wednesday too, and Thursday, and told her the bread was fine actually. She wrote his soup on a card by the till so anyone could find it if she was off.

The carriage was full and the man with the crutch was doing the thing where you pretend you are fine. Nobody moved. A girl of about nine looked up from her phone, looked at him, looked at the row of adults staring hard at nothing, and stood up. Her mum grabbed her sleeve, because it was a forty minute ride and the kid had been up since five.

The girl said it in a normal voice, not a stage voice, just excuse me, do you want to sit down. The man said no thank you love, which is what people say. She said okay and stayed standing anyway, holding the pole, so the seat sat there empty between them like an argument. Two stops of that.

Then a man in a suit got up and gave his own seat to the girl, and the man with the crutch took the empty one without discussion, because now it was not charity, it was just a seat. Three people ended up shuffling. Nobody said anything else about it. The girl went back to her phone.

Her mum sat there looking at the side of her daughter's head like she had never seen her before.

Tom worked nights at the depot and came into the cafe at six in the morning smelling of diesel. He ordered the same thing for two years. Then his hours got cut and he started ordering just the tea. Aisha noticed on the third Friday.

So she started getting his order wrong. A bacon roll would appear next to his tea and she would say sorry, made two, the ticket printed twice, you may as well have it or it goes in the bin. She did this for eleven weeks. She got very good at it.

She would sigh at the till like the machine had personally wronged her. Tom knew. Of course he knew. There is no printer on earth that makes that mistake eleven Fridays running.

But he ate the roll every time, because taking it was easier than saying the true thing out loud at six in the morning. When his hours came back he ordered the roll properly and paid, and then he left a tip that was exactly eleven times the price of a bacon roll, and he went out the door fast so she could not give it back.

Someone left two hundred pounds in an envelope in Dana's pigeonhole with her name on it and nothing else. This was the week the boiler went and her car failed its MOT in the same four days. She had not told anyone at work. She had told one person, on the phone, in the car park, and she had thought she was alone.

She asked around. Everybody said it was not them, including the person it was, presumably. She got quite forensic about it. She compared handwriting on the sign in sheet.

She narrowed it to four people and then to two, and then she got the boiler fixed and stopped narrowing. Eighteen months later a young lad in her team was going through it, new baby, no sleep, rent gone up. Dana put two hundred pounds in an envelope with his name on it and left it in his pigeonhole and denied it to his face for the next three years. She still does not know who did hers.

She has decided she does not need to. Somebody in that building is walking around having gotten away with it, and that is fine by her.

The knock came at ten past nine on a Sunday. Ken from number twelve, whom nobody liked much because of the thing with the fence, was standing there with a ladder and a face like he was returning something stolen. He said your gutter is coming away at the corner and it will take the fascia with it by winter. Sarah said she would call someone.

Ken said he was someone. He was up there for two hours. He had brought his own brackets. When she came out with tea he had already cleared the gutter along the whole run, including the bit over her neighbour's side, and he was picking wet leaves out of the grass because he did not want to leave them on her lawn.

She asked what she owed him. He said the brackets were four pounds and he was not going to take four pounds off her. Then he went home and did not mention it again, not once, not at the street barbecue, not when the fence came up again in August. Her gutter is still on.

She waves at him now. He waves back like they have always done that.

Every Friday Mr Owens read out the spelling scores and every Friday Callum came last, and he had a routine for it, a grin and a shrug he had built to survive that exact minute. In April Mr Owens stopped reading them out. No announcement.

He just stopped, and handed the papers back face down instead, and if anyone asked he said he had gone off the sound of his own voice. On Callum's paper he wrote, in pencil, small, so nobody else would see it from across the desk: your handwriting is the best in this class and I am not saying that to be nice. It was true.

The kid wrote like a wedding invitation and nobody had ever mentioned it because they were all busy counting his mistakes. Callum did not become good at spelling. He got a bit better.

He is thirty one now and he does the chalkboards for a pub and people photograph them, and when anyone asks where he learned he says a teacher told him once, and he cannot remember the man's first name, and he has still got the piece of paper.

A pigeon got into the ward at four in the afternoon and the entire staff response fell apart within ninety seconds. Two porters with a laundry bag. A junior doctor giving directions from behind a curtain.

Bev, who had been a nurse for twenty six years, standing on a chair with a bedpan and a look of total concentration. In bay three there was a man who had not spoken since Tuesday, who would not eat, who had turned his face to the wall and stayed there through three shift changes. The pigeon landed on his blanket.

Bev said, without lowering the bedpan, do not make any sudden movements, he can smell fear. The man laughed. It was a horrible cracked noise, out of practice, and it went on longer than the joke deserved, and his daughter, who was in the chair beside him with her coat still on, put both hands over her face.

The pigeon left through the window it came in by. Bev got down off the chair and went to bay three and asked the man if he wanted toast, and he said yes, and that was the first thing he had eaten in four days.

The layoff came by email on a Tuesday, which he thought was rude even by the standards of the year. Nineteen years at the plant. He was fifty three and his hands knew one job. For six weeks he applied for work that did not exist and got nothing back, not even a no. His wife stopped asking how it went because the answer never changed.

One night he could not sleep and he sat in the kitchen with the light off. In the morning he drove to the community college to ask about welding certification, mostly because the parking lot was on his way to nowhere. The woman at the desk told him the class had started three weeks ago. He said he would catch up. She said the instructor was tough.

He said he had been fired by email. She laughed and enrolled him. He was the oldest person in the room by twenty years. The kids called him sir and then they called him by his name and then they started asking him questions. He failed the first practical.

He passed the second. Eight months later a shop hired him at less money than the plant paid, and he took it, and on the first day he found he was nervous in a way he had not been in two decades.

She stood at the shallow end for four weeks before she put her face in the water. The instructor was patient about it. Everyone else in the adult beginner class could at least float. She could not, because at eight years old she had gone under at a lake and nobody had noticed for a while, and after that her whole family agreed she was not a water person.

She believed it for fifty three years. Her granddaughter asked her to come to the beach that summer and she said no again, and then heard herself say it, and something about the sound of her own voice bothered her all week. So she signed up. Week five she went under on purpose and came up and the instructor said good and moved on, like it was nothing, like people did it every day.

She cried in the locker room. Week nine she swam one length of the pool with terrible form, breathing wrong, arms slapping, and she touched the far wall and held on and could not believe how short it was. In August she went to the beach. She did not swim out far.

She stood in water up to her chest with her granddaughter on her hip and let the waves push them both around.

They had not spoken in eleven years. The fight had been about something real at the time and then it became about who would go first, and neither of them would. She heard through a cousin that her old friend had moved back into town. She typed a message. She deleted it. She typed it again over the next two days, three sentences, then one, then three again, and every version sounded either too casual or like a hostage note.

On the third night she wrote hey and hit send by accident while trying to fix the capital letter. Just hey. Lowercase. To a woman she had known since they were nine. She put the phone face down on the counter and stood there feeling ill. It buzzed four minutes later.

It said hey, and then a second later it said I have been trying to write to you since March. They met for coffee that Saturday and it was awkward for about six minutes. Her friend had gotten divorced. She had lost her dad. Neither of them knew any of it. They sat there for three hours and the waitress kept refilling the cups without asking.

On the way out her friend said we were so stupid, and she said yes, and they made a plan for Thursday.

He had told everyone he was going to run a 5K, which was the mistake. Forty pounds overweight, a desk job, and a large mouth. Day one he made it to the end of his street and had to stop and pretend to check his phone so the neighbors would think he had received important news. Day four a woman walking a corgi passed him. Not jogging. Walking.

The corgi had legs the length of a dinner roll and it went by him like he was parked. He stood on the sidewalk and considered the whole shape of his life. Then he went home, and instead of quitting, he did something stupider. He decided his only goal was to beat the corgi. He did not try to run three miles. He tried to outpace a dog with eight inch legs.

It took eleven days. When he finally passed them the woman said good morning and he was too winded to answer, which he felt undercut the moment. He kept going anyway. He ran the 5K in October and came in somewhere in the middle. He does not know the woman's name. He does not know the dog's name.

He has a photo of them from behind on his phone, which he admits is strange.

He had missed the recital, and it was not the first one. Work called it a busy season and had been calling it that for four years. He got to the school as the parents were coming out, still in his coat, and his daughter saw him in the parking lot and did not say anything at all. That was the part that got him.

Not anger. She had already adjusted. He sat in the car after she went inside with her mother and did not start the engine for a long time. He did not quit his job.

He could not. What he did was write down every Thursday for the next year on a paper calendar and put it in his work bag where he would see it, and he told his manager he was unavailable Thursday evenings, and his manager said fine, which was somehow worse, because it meant he could have asked at any point. The first few Thursdays were nothing. They ate dinner and she did homework and he read.

Around week seven she started talking to him without being asked a question first. By spring she was telling him about people at school he had never heard of, whole lives, running arguments, who was mad at who.

The bookstore was closing in March and she was working out the last of her notice, boxing up stock that would go back to the publishers. Twenty two years behind that counter. She was fifty eight and had no plan and had started saying she would figure it out in a tone that made people stop asking. A woman came in on a Tuesday to return a book she had bought the week before, which nobody does at a store that is closing.

She said she did not want a refund. She wanted to give it back so someone else could have it. Inside the front cover she had written a few lines about who had recommended it to her and what year and what she had been going through. The bookseller said that was nice and put it in the box.

Then she took it out of the box. She started asking customers to do it. Write in the front, leave it, take another one. Within two weeks the front table was people's handwriting.

The store still closed. But a woman who came in for the table asked her about running something similar at the library annex, part time, badly paid, and she said yes before the sentence was finished.

Six months in, the foreman told him he was not going to make it. Not cruelly. He said it the way you tell someone their car is beyond repair. The kid was slow, he dropped things, he measured twice and cut wrong anyway. He sat in his truck at lunch and drafted a text quitting and did not send it, only because he owed money on the truck.

That afternoon an older guy on the crew, a man who had said maybe forty words to him total, walked over and handed him a pencil. Not a new pencil. A flat carpenter's pencil worn down to a stub, sharpened with a knife. He said your marks are too fat, that is your whole problem, you are cutting to the middle of a quarter inch line. Then he walked away.

The kid started marking with a knife line instead. His cuts tightened up inside a week. It was not the only thing wrong with him but it was the thing that made the other problems fixable, because now he could see which of his mistakes were his hands and which were his eyes. The foreman never apologized and never brought it up again. Four years later the kid was running his own crew and he kept the stub in his shirt pocket where it was no use to anybody.