Kindness begins with...

I am not sure why I am writing this. The story I am about to tell is real but for me served as a metaphor. It seemed important to share.

 Last Sunday evening I was driving to a restaurant in Vancouver, WA around 8 pm. As I approached a major intersection, traffic was really bogging down. The Salmon Creek area is a rural area and the intersection huge for the area. It is 5 to 6 lanes each way so to have it bog down anytime, especially a Sunday evening is odd. It is a complicated intersection. Partly because of its sheer size and partly because this intersection serves as both on and off ramps for Interstate 5 (North & South) and Interstate -205 (North and South).

As I approached the intersection I saw an elderly woman in her broken car, on the phone and sobbing. It seemed clear she had been there for a while. People were honking and doing the normal rude things people do in traffic snarls. In any given couple of minutes hundreds of people pass by this spot. Yet no one stopped to help. As I drove up, I rolled down my window and asked if she needed help. She seemed disoriented and was very upset and offered no response. With the tractor/trailer big rig behind me blaring his horn for me to get out of his way, she probably could not hear me. I rolled through the intersection and initially thought to call 911. She was completely out of her dead car now. I noticed there were no emergency flashers and lots of cars moving by all round her. It was too unsafe to wait for someone remote to help. I thought… well, I could call 911 and go on to dinner. Or I could do what do the right thing and find a way to help. I am ashamed to admit it but for an albeit single moment, I thought about calling 911 and going on to the restaurant… 

In an instant, I made the decision to turn back. I made the ten-block circle to be able to come up from behind, pulled up in front and then backed up to her car. (Much more honking now! My great big 3500 HD DRW truck was also blocking traffic.)  I convinced her to get back in her car. A woman came from the cross walk and helped me by directing traffic while I crawled under the disabled vehicle and tied a rope to the frame and then crawled out and secured the rope to my tow hitch. This was one of those moments, with cars driving by in a hurry and my body exposed to oncoming traffic, I wondered what I was doing and why I wasn’t sitting at the bar having a glass of wine! There was a pickup next to me and I asked him to temporarily block traffic with his truck so I could cross the huge intersection with my truck pulling her disabled car. Thankfully he was accommodating. I pulled her car out of the intersection and about a half mile up the road to the nearest easily accessible parking lot. She was safe and all was back to normal.

While I sat in the restaurant having my dinner and a glass of wine, it made me think about the symbolism of the intersection and our culture as a people. I thought about the lyrics to a Billy Joel song, “Pressure”.

“You have to learn to pace yourself

You're just like everybody else

You've only had to run so far-So good

But you will come to a place

Where the only thing you feel

Are loaded guns in your face

And you'll have to deal with

Pressure”

...

“I'm sure you'll have some cosmic rationale

But here you are in the ninth

Two men out and three men on

Nowhere to look but inside

Where we all respond to

Pressure”

Let’s face it. We are all under enormous stress these days. For example, todays geo-politics are scary, at least to me. We all have very busy lives that we pack so full we rarely get a moment to breathe let alone relish the moment. But hundreds, and I mean hundreds of people, got angry and expressed themselves without consideration for the elderly woman with the broken car in the middle of a busy intersection. That is not the America I was raised in and it isn’t the America I am willing to pass on to my kids.  

I didn’t write this to pat myself on the back. Like I said, I embarrassed myself early on in the experience.  I wrote to beg a much bigger question. Forget about what government should do. Forget about what your boss or neighbor should do. Forget about what your spouse should do! Sticking with the story, metaphorically; stop honking and get out and help! It seems to me that each of us is a mirror image of the elderly woman at multiple points in our lives. We would want someone to stop and help. When you look in the mirror every morning & every evening, just simply ask, “Did I do the right things today?” Did you? I am having it made into a card I can carry with me. I know it sounds corny, but I see how little invisible and random acts of caring/kindness/compassion make a difference. You can make a difference every single day. We just need to be deliberate in our actions and expectations. We need to practice!

In closing I am going to leave you with a quote from a good friend and colleague, Bernie Reifkind (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/berniereifkind/). “When we wait for/or expect someone else to make the difference, it never happens. You and only you, make it happen.”