Nothing profound should happen to you while out thrift shopping or driving a bus,

but that's exactly how things go down in the next hour of selected shorts.

Two people just going about their days have what we might call unexpected revelations.

Maybe something is about to happen for you, too, just listening to the radio.

I'm Meg Wallitzer. You'll have to stay with me to find out.

You're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

We don't accidentally learn anything. Acquiring knowledge is hard work.

We don't pick up anything effortlessly the way Keanu Reeves downloads Kung Fu in The Matrix.

We read and study and think and ask questions, take notes, and compare those notes with others.

And if we should be so lucky to have an aha moment, it's the result of blood, sweat, and tears.

But sometimes, very, very rarely, there are moments in which we receive some genuine

piece of knowledge, some fundamental truth about the world and how we live in it without really

meaning to. It's not something we can plan and it's not something we can rely on, but it does

happen, almost like an accident.

I actually found a piece of knowledge or wisdom in a moment that didn't seem very auspicious.

It was long ago when I remember that I was at home, and something had happened in my life that had made me cry,

and my young kid came into the room and saw me and got upset that I was upset.

And all I wanted to do in that

moment was quickly wipe away my tears and pretend to be fine. But then I realized that if I let myself

cry and if the next day he saw that I was okay, this might be something that he could take in

and maybe learn from. So it was like a knowledge doubleheader. I had an aha moment, and the next day,

maybe he had one too. On today's selected shorts, stories about just this kind of unexpected revelation.

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