I looked down at my royal blue Woodland high-ankle shoes and sighed.
The tread had thinned with time, the sole worn slick and uneven—years of roads remembered in silence. Yet the leather still held its pride, the color still spoke of style and stories. Too good to discard, I thought. Too weary to continue.
As I tugged at the eyelet, it slipped free in my hand, as if the shoes themselves were asking for rest.
I hurried to the cobbler’s shop, a small place where time seemed to move slower and wisdom sat quietly beside worn tools. He repaired the eyelet with careful hands and then, almost shyly, looked up and said,
“If you have any spare shoes… please give them to me.”
I hesitated.
“Will they fit you?” I asked.
He smiled softly. “They are beautiful. You still wear these. If you have any other pair of old shoes, those will do for me.”
I remembered what Coco Chanel once said: “The best things in life are free. The second best are very expensive.”
And suddenly, these shoes felt like they belonged to the first kind.
“Try them,” I said. “Do they fit?”
He slipped them on. Perfect. As if the shoes had been waiting for him all along.
“You keep them,” I said.
His face lit up—not with the happiness of owning something new, but with the deeper joy of being seen. In that moment, he was happier than I had ever been when I bought them fresh from the store.
As I walked away, lighter somehow, I recalled a line often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi:
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
Those shoes had walked many paths with me.
That day, they began a better journey.
Pic : Pexels
