Helping Out

I believe that people at their core are good. And I have gotten to see examples of that lately. There have been a few times where people have gone out of their way to help others. These have been kind of extreme examples, but beautiful none the less.

The first one was when I was playing tennis with a friend. This was the first time that I have played in years, and my tennis "career" was a semester of tennis class in college. But there we were on a nice sunny morning playing. It was going pretty well, meaning that I missed less shots than I thought I would. One volley didn't end well though. My friend ran to hit the ball, fell and dislocated his shoulder. (poor guy) The nice part about the situation was that there were three different people who walked over to us to make sure that we were okay, and one even offered her car if we didn't have one and needed to go to the hospital.

The second scenario happened at the Tough Mudder, a hard core 10 mile crazy difficult obstacle course. A man was running through hanging electrical wires and over mud and hay. He fell and was in pain on the ground. His family ran back to him (some had finished the obstacle) or stopped if they were with him. They all then knelt in the mud beside him. It was a pretty picture of caring well for someone. There they are soaking in the mud.

Now I am not saying that it was good that either of those people got hurt, but there was a beauty and grace to how people around reacted.

As others ran through the same obstacle on the Tough Mudder course, lots of people stood by and cheered, yelling encouragements if they were getting up out of the mud. It was powerful.

On the way home, we rode on the ferry. We did not fit on the first ferry. The second ferry came and we almost made it on. We had pulled up to get on, but then had to back up once realizing that it was full. A man came up to our window and told us that he had saved us a spot in the front of his lane if we needed to back up into it. Nice.

These moments of kindness and people looking out for each other do happen. I hope that they happen often. I was struck by them lately and took notice.