Helping others remains my guiding light always

Earlier this week I left a medical appointment, walked onto the elevator, waited for it to whoosh me to the lobby 18 floors below and started thinking about trust. How often I rely on trust in a day. How much it shapes my worldview. How crippling it would be to lose it as a guiding force.

I trusted that the elevator would work. I trusted that the certificate announcing its maintenance was authentic. I trusted my doctor to help me heal. I trusted the degrees on his wall. I trusted the water that came out of his waiting room water cooler. On my drive home, I trusted the other drivers to stop on red when I went on green.

I trusted all of those things despite the fact that they’re not infallible truths. I know elevators break and patients are harmed and water can carry diseases and cars run red lights. So why did they all feel trustworthy?

I think because, through a lifetime of observing and narrating people’s stories, through a lifetime of witnessing the human spirit, through a lifetime of marveling at what we’re capable of when we lean into our better angels, I trust us to take care of each other.

I trust that we want to take care of each other. Lately that is feeling shaky. It’s difficult to watch an unjustified war and unspeakable cruelty toward immigrants and a mass shooting at a California high school graduation, and comedians and correspondents alike being kicked off TV for failing to kowtow to the president and feel like, generally, we want to take care of each other.

Still, I’m not budging. Not on this one. Not on something so central to how I go through the world and something I’ve seen play out hundreds, if not thousands, of times. More than half my columns, I’d wager a bet, are about people taking care of each other. I write them because they’re the truth, and my job is to write the truth. But I also write them because they sustain me. They sustain my belief in our appetite and ability for care. They sustain my belief in us. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a lost jacket returned to me from overseas. I asked friends and readers for their stories about lost items returned, and I shared some of them.

“If humanity could somehow be measured,” my friend Audrone Jaraite offered, “the effort people make to return lost things to their owners would be one of the truest measurements.” Stories keep pouring in. I drink them like water. You should get to taste them too. Here are a few:

“In the early 2000s,” Val Schnable wrote, “I received a phone call from a woman in Colorado on Mother’s Day. Her son, 16, had lost his wallet with some cash in it. My son, in his early 20s, had found the wallet and returned it with everything intact. The caller wanted to thank me for raising an honest son. She said her son had just received his driver’s license and had worked hard for the money in his wallet. One of my best Mother’s Day gifts ever.”

“Your column reminded me of a road trip we took when I was about four or five from our home town in Clifton, New Jersey, to Chicago over summer vacation,” Arlene Davis wrote. “As there were no credit cards, my mother carried all their needed cash for a two-week trip in her purse. Also there were no interstate highways, so we drove through every little town along the way. Somewhere near Allentown, Pennsylvania, Dad stopped for gas and mom took me to the station's bathroom.”

You see where this is going. Mom placed her purse on the top of the toilet tank, forgot about it and returned to the car. Two hours later, she realised she didn’t have her purse.

“My brother, the resident genius at age 8, swore he would recognise the correct station and we headed back,” Davis wrote. “As we approached the gas station, he yelled out, ‘There, that one!’ And my parents went into the station office. After describing her purse to the owner, he promptly took it out from under the counter and handed it to her. I don't know how much cash was in the purse, but apparently not one penny was missing.”

A woman found it in the restroom and turned it into the owner, neither of whom helped themselves to its contents. “My dad offered him some money as a thank you, but he refused,” Davis wrote. “I'm not sure if I actually remember this from the time, or maybe just from hearing my parents tell the story over the years. Of course, my brother got a good deal of mileage out of the story, being the hero who remembered the particular station.”