Dear Esteemed Readers,
I want to tell you two true stories that boosted my faith in humans.
I suspect you will find story number one extraordinary and story number two a bit more mundane, at least by comparison.
So—on a hunch—I’m going to sandwich the mundane story in between the beginning and the end of the extraordinary tale.
Let’s see what that brings forth.
Story One:
Last year, my father and I were on our way home from walking Kingsly through a nearby neighborhood. We were strolling alongside a four-lane highway where cars and trucks routinely exceed speeds of sixty-five miles per hour. Kingsly sometimes barks at the tractor trailers; we can actually feel them roaring by just a few feet away from the sidewalk.
As we approached an intersection, we saw something horrifying.
A toddler was emerging from a residential side street. She was all alone. She had on nothing except a pink skirt. Her bare feet were slapping the asphalt as she ran directly toward an unending stream of highway traffic.
We were a good distance from her. She was only maybe twelve feet from the highway. There was no way I could run fast enough to intercept her.
“I don’t like this,” Dad said, as we watched the child run toward the four lanes of speeding cars and trucks.
I was just about to start sprinting—even though I knew I’d never make it in time—when I saw an elderly woman running after the child. She was still a good fifteen feet behind, but she was closing in rapidly.
“This is not good,” Dad said.
The little girl traversed the first white line of the crosswalk, which put her just seven feet from certain death. She was quickly moving forward.
The old woman was now four feet behind and gaining.
No one in the many passing vehicles saw the little girl approaching the highway; traffic just kept zooming right on by.
I started waving my hands over my head. I pointed and yelled, “Watch out!” which did absolutely nothing to slow down the endless whoosh of passing cars and trucks.
“Is that little girl going to die?” my father asked.
Story Two:
A month or so after that first story took place, I was having a very bad day. I honestly don’t remember the cause of my misery. I was probably not writing well and feeling sorry for myself. I can’t recall why else I was grumpy, but I was in a dark place.
I drove to the post office, parked my beater Jeep, hopped out, and frowned. Through the large glass windows, I could see there was a long line. Via informed delivery, I had earlier that morning been email alerted to the fact that a yellow slip was waiting in my P.O. Box, which meant that I had to retrieve it and then wait in said line in order to exchange the yellow slip for my package, whatever that might be. And if I didn’t want to make the twenty-minute round trip a second time, I had to be patient.
The horror.
Inside, the post office was hot and clammy. The line was not moving.
I felt ridiculously resentful of all the people who had arrived before me. Sure, I had politely held the door for the elderly couple exiting while I was entering. I was even saying hello to and flashing smiles at anyone who gave me eye contact. But my internal monologue was dreadful.
Why did all of these extra people have to show up at the post office right before I got here? Why were they inconveniencing ME? Don’t they know I have things to do this afternoon?
Like I said, in my mind, I was being the worst.
Then a man entered and walked right to the front of the line.
Incredulously, I watched, and—while I kept smiling politely on the outside—my internal monologue screamed, Does he really not see the rest of us here? Who does this guy think he is? The nerve! People really are selfish!
When the alleged line-cutter reached the counter, he leaned in toward the post office employee at the register and said, “Excuse me, but I found this in the parking lot and just wanted to see if anyone was looking for it.”
“Anyone lose a cellphone?” the post office employee yelled.
As I instinctively felt my empty pockets, I recognized my phone in the man’s hand, which he was holding above his head.
Then I felt my stomach drop.
I felt so guilty for thinking ill of this man that, for a second or two, I couldn’t speak.
Finally, I said, “That’s mine. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
He cheerfully walked over to me and said, “Here you go.”
“You saved me from having a truly terrible day,” I said, as I patted the man’s back. “I really, really appreciate it.”
Then I had to restrain the urge to hug him, as he humbly nodded and smiled, before exiting the post office—which made me realize that he didn’t even need to go to the counter, but had made a special trip back inside just to help out a stranger.
Suddenly, the room didn’t feel hot and clammy anymore. And the people around me seemed like old friends. The man who had returned my cellphone had cast a remarkable spell.
“Can I tell you the problem you’re having?” the old timer behind me said in a thick southern accent that I will not attempt to phonetically spell.
When I turned around, I saw that he was probably in his eighties. He was dressed in a way that made me wonder if he was or had once been a farmer. In my mind now, I see muddy boots and overalls.
“Sure,” I said, preparing myself for a life-changing message from the universe.
“You can’t take those things out of your house,” he said and then pointed to my hand.
“Cellphones?” I raised mine up between us.
“I have one, but I always leave it in the same place. On the kitchen counter. It’s always there plugged in. So I never lose it. You should do that too. You’ll never lose that thing again.”
I looked into his eyes to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. Which made me smile.
“Like the good old days,” I said.
“Like today. I left mine right there in the kitchen. I don’t have it on me. Maybe you take a cellphone with you on a long road trip. Otherwise, just leave it on the counter. That’s where you’ll need it to be when you go looking for it.”
“Good advice,” I said.
It felt like I was in a play and everyone in the post office was being thoroughly entertained. I traded smiles with my fellow humans, who—on the other side of the kindness I had received—all seemed much less adversarial.
When I finally got to the front of the line, I held up my cellphone and said, “People are looking out for me today.”
The post office worker smiled and said, “Um-hmmm.”
Back To Story One:
As Dad and I watched the little girl race toward four lanes of traffic, I honestly thought we were about to witness the gruesome death of a child.
Then the old woman dove like an NFL linebacker.
On asphalt.
And just barely grabbed the child’s shoulder, gently bringing the little girl down onto her butt, maybe just four or five feet from the highway.
Dad and I breathed a sigh of relief. We assumed the little girl had been reunited with her grandmother. And all was well.
But as we closed the gap between them and us, the grandmother wasn’t getting up. She was just holding the little girl between her legs, which were spread out in the crosswalk like a V.
“Are you okay?” I yelled.
“She’s not cooperating. Can you help me?” she yelled back.
Kingsly and I ran to them and—as I helped the woman to her feet, making sure to keep my excited dog on the other side of me—I said, “I’m so glad you were able to catch your granddaughter. I really thought we were in for tragedy.”
“This isn’t my granddaughter,” she said, which is when I noticed that the girl was trying to free herself from the woman’s grip. “I just saw her running down the street and thought I’d better stop her from making it to the highway.”
“So you don’t know her?”
“I’ve never seen this child before in my life. Can you help me get her off the road?”
“Okay,” I said. “But my father here has dementia and my dog doesn’t always do well with children.”
“Oh, wow. We’re in a mess, aren’t we?”
I tied Kingsly’s leash around my father’s wrist and said, “Whatever you do, Dad, don’t let go.”
I could tell my father grasped the severity of the situation, because he nodded with a conviction I hadn’t seen from him in years.
I helped the woman get the child onto someone’s front-yard grass. As the girl fought us, I looked around and saw that there were no other people within eyesight.
“Do you know where she lives?” I asked.
“Where do you live, sweetheart?” the woman tried.
But the little girl wouldn’t speak. I got the sense that she couldn’t yet.
“I think we should call 911,” I said.
“I really don’t know what else we can do,” the woman answered.
I called 911 and the dispatcher took our location and a description of the little girl. I stayed on the line while a police car was routed to us.
That’s when a truck pulled up and the mother of the child got out. She explained that they had company and one of the visiting kids left the front door wide open. “My daughter must have just wandered out,” the mother explained. “With all the guests, there’s a lot going on at our home right now.”
As the older woman handed over the girl, I relayed what was going on to the 911 operator, who called off the police.
After the mother thanked us, I felt compelled to say, “I just need to make sure you understand that this woman ran as fast as she could, dove on asphalt, and stopped your little girl from running out into highway traffic just in the nick of time. This woman here is a bona fide hero. She was amazing. She absolutely saved your daughter’s life.”
The mother hugged the older woman.
Once the mother and daughter got into the truck and departed, the older woman told Dad and me that she used to be an elementary school teacher and just had a knack for minding kids. Then she said she was glad to have walked out her front door when she did that morning, or else she might have missed the girl. She played the whole event off like she had merely lent her neighbor a cup of flour, which—quite frankly—astounded me.
As we began to walk away, the woman yelled, “Thank you for helping me. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t have come along.”
“You’re the hero today!” I yelled back over my shoulder. “What you did was extraordinary!”
As Dad, Kingsly, and I walked back into our own neighborhood, Dad kept saying over and over, “That wasn’t right, was it? What we saw. A little girl should not be running toward traffic all alone. That wasn’t right. Because that little girl could have died. Am I wrong?”
And I kept saying, “It wasn’t right, Dad. You are one-hundred-percent correct. The girl would have most likely been killed if that woman hadn’t have been there to stop her from running into traffic.”
Then I noticed that my chest was tight and my hands were shaking. I had been terrified for that little girl, who seemed completely oblivious to the danger she had put herself in.
Denouement:
Many months later—while listening to an episode of Digital Jung about the symbolic life—I was running through the neighborhoods surrounding ours. And I kept thinking about the two stories I just told you. After the podcast host read a line from a Rilke poem called The Man Watching, I paused the episode. Feeling deeply moved, I began to mentally compose what you are reading here.
I had witnessed a tiny miracle when the older woman saved that child. It had made a profound impact on me, restoring my faith in humans. And then—almost immediately—I mentally discarded that tremendous symbolic gift. Mere weeks later—after having witnessed the absolute best that human beings have to offer—I went right back to mistrusting people, thinking of my fellow post-office customers as inconveniences and line-cutters.
The man who had found and returned my cellphone only knew me as a grateful receiver of a good deed. He hadn’t experienced the darkness that was inside of me on that down day I was having. He also didn’t get to see the miracle his kindness produced. He didn’t know that he was giving me the follow-up booster shot to Story One’s vaccine—that he was helping to eradicate my festering misanthropy.
Likewise, the little girl didn’t understand how just close she had gotten to death, nor is she likely to even remember the woman who dove on asphalt to keep her from running into traffic. But the toddler is alive because of the selfless valor of a neighbor. And everything she becomes when she grows up will only be possible because a stranger long ago took the time—and risked injury—to save her life.
I pondered all of this while I jogged through the very crosswalk where I had first encountered the heroic elderly woman and the little girl.
Then I began to wonder about all the times my actions had changed another’s internal reality—for better or worse—without my knowing it. And I also wondered just how many times I’d benefited from heroic acts of kindness that I either did not remember or had no knowledge of in the first place.
As I finished up my run, I began to feel a great urge to find the mother of the runaway child and tell that mom she must make sure her daughter remembers the story of the stranger saving her young life, if only so the child grows up knowing that people value her life enough to save it—and that unheralded but life-saving acts of kindness exist in the world and should be replicated. But the mother’s face had already faded from my memory and I had no idea which house was hers.
Then I realized I felt an overwhelming amount of gratitude for what my father and I had witnessed. I was so shaken and moved because I didn’t believe there would be anyone to save the child, but there had been. And the scared, neglected little boy who still lives inside of me found that symbolic—and maybe even sacred—knowledge to be profoundly healing.
In a way, these are non-stories. I didn’t lose my cellphone. The little girl didn’t die. Neither event makes for much more than an anecdote. But I’m starting to think that—at least for those of us who are looking to calm our nervous systems and restore our faith in humanity—these are the types of tales we must weave with meticulous awareness so that they become permanently woven into the fabric of our worldviews.
What stories are you feeding your soul?
How are you affecting the internal landscapes of your fellow humans?
Life-changing questions to ponder.
Your man in the Lowcountry,
Matthew
PS - Did you read the April 21st post? The True Route Up Mountain You (Wholeness Is An Inside Job)