“Life doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers.”
Two Stops Away
I was two stops away from getting off the bus when a thought crossed my mind.
Check for your wallet.
There was no reason to. I had used it to pay my fare, like I always do. In my mind, it was safely tucked away in my backpack.
Still, something told me to look.
I slipped my backpack off my shoulder, unzipped it, and searched the pocket where I usually keep it.
Nothing.
In that instant, my stomach dropped.
Then I remembered pulling my cellphone from my sweatpants pocket earlier in the ride. Without realizing it, my wallet must have come out with it and fallen somewhere near my seat.
I jumped up and hurried to the back of the bus. A passenger was already sitting where I had been. I searched the floor and saw nothing. Panic began to creep in.
My driver’s license. My credit cards. Cash. Everything I would have spent the next several days trying to replace.
I asked a woman seated nearby if she had seen a black wallet.
She hadn’t.
But then she paused and pointed toward a narrow space between the seat and the divider.
“What’s that over there?”
At first I didn’t see it.
Then I looked again.
There it was.
Wedged in a place I would have easily missed.
Relief washed over me.
All I could do was thank her over and over.
The truth is, I wasn’t thinking about a wallet anymore.
I was thinking about timing.
Had that thought arrived two minutes later, I would have been off the bus and halfway through a workout before realizing anything was wrong. Hours would have been lost. The bus would have been gone. The outcome could have been very different.
Instead, a quiet voice said, check.
Some people call it intuition.
Some call it instinct.
Some call it God.
Whatever name we give it, I have learned not to ignore those moments.
Life doesn’t always shout.
Sometimes it whispers.
And every now and then, listening to that whisper changes everything.
