Today as I was driving in to work, I passed a woman sitting in her car in front of a stoplight with her hazard lights on. It was obvious her car had malfunctioned and she was stranded. As the stream of cars flowed around her, my thoughts progressed from wanting to help her to explaining to myself my inability to do so based on the lack of shoulder in which to pull over.
As I continued on my way I found myself torn. Should I have stopped to help? After all, I am an able-bodied fairly young and strong man, I would certainly have been able at the very least to push her car out of the way of traffic. So why didn’t I stop?
I had reasoned to myself that if there had been space to safely pull over, I would have stopped to help her. But the truth is, I was just making excuses. I wasn’t running late for work, but I wasn’t early either. Helping her would have made me late. I had cars right behind me, pressuring me to keep going. If I had space in traffic I would have been able to think more clearly and find a way to help. If I knew more about how cars work and how to fix them I would have been able to get her going again.
All of these are excuses, and I know that what I really should have done is pull off into the grass and help her get her car out of the intersection where she could safely wait for a tow truck. I didn’t do that, instead I kept on driving.
When we are comfortable in our lives, we have everything we need, everyone in our family is healthy, we have enough money to fulfill our food, shelters and clothing needs, it’s easy to look at someone in distress and find reasons why we don’t need to help them. They probably already have help on the way, they probably ran out of gas and now they are learning an important lesson, they should just bite the bullet and buy a new car so they don’t have these issues.
These are all just excuses we make to justify our inaction to ourselves. This “herd mentality” of hoping someone else will do something helps none of us, and is a detriment to society as a whole. We all must face ourselves in these situations, and look upon those who need help with compassion and empathy. We all drive around in incredibly complex machines with thousands of moving parts that must all work together perfectly to function, and most of us have no idea what to do when these machines malfunction. This woman could have been me, or you, or any one of us.
I started my day today by passing someone by who could possibly have used my assistance. I wasn’t fast enough in my decision making to figure out how to help them, and I failed in doing my part to help society in this way.
I could blame all of the other people passing her as well. I could reasonably argue that the people on her side of the road had a much easier possibility of safely pulling over and making their way to her. That doesn’t change the fact of my negligence. We all have a responsibility as members of society to make sure those around us remain fed, so that we may better feed ourselves.
At the end of all of this, she probably had called a tow truck, who probably showed up not too long after I passed her and she has probably resolved the issue by now. Regardless, I could have, rather I should have, made the effort to at least make a sincere offer to help, which would have not only made her day better, it would have made me feel better as well. When we put care into another’s bucket, our own bucket fills a little as well.
I may have passed this opportunity to better myself today, but the recognition of this missed opportunity is a step in the right direction. Next time I will have this incident to look back on, and how I proceed from there will determine if I have learned how to be a better person or if I am stagnant in my growth. Keep growing. Keep filling buckets.
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