Mind The Business That Needs Minding

Someone at the rehab center didn’t charge Cynthia’s chair properly this morning. I met her a little while ago outside my gym, where her motorized wheelchair was caught in a crack on a slight incline in the sidewalk, just around the corner from the home of a friend she was visiting. She just didn’t have the juice to get over the crack and up the hill. (That last sentence really makes it seem like this post is about drugs! It’s not.)

I didn’t know all of this when I approached. All I knew was that there was a lady sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk, not really going anywhere and not really at any recognizable destination. I didn’t even know if I should approach, to be honest. Maybe I should just mind my own business, I thought. I decided, though, to ask if everything was okay and I found out what you now know, and I helped her over that crack and a few others, over the hill, and around the corner. We had a very nice conversation about Thanksgiving, the fall foliage, and the gym, and she and her friend, Butch, thanked me heartily when we arrived a few minutes later.

It was a good feeling, to be sure, and I’m glad I decided to stop, but I’m not telling the story so you’ll know how noble I am, what a nice thing I did, or how lucky she was that I happened by. I’m telling the story because it stirred within me many thoughts – some disturbing and some hopeful – and some simple truths.

First, I am astounded by how close I came to “minding my own business” and leaving Cynthia to try to handle the situation alone until, hopefully, someone else came along. I didn’t ask her how long she had been there before I came. Maybe I was the first person to pass on foot (it’s not a heavily pedestrian area); I hope so. And I wonder if I would have stopped so willingly if I “had some place to be.”

Cynthia seems to be a perfectly lovely person. I’m happy to have met her. She can’t walk, or at least not too well, but she certainly isn’t some kind of helpless drain on the society around her. She happened to hit a circumstance today in which her battery didn’t have what it took to get up the hill and she needed a little push.

Many among us hold dear and extol the virtue of self-reliance, as we should. It is a great thing to be able to lift and hold one’s self up physically, mentally, emotionally, economically, and in other ways. In political and economic discussions of late, I have heard many speak with disdain about those who can not do so financially. Some are in dire economic situations because of their own doing, certainly. Some, however, have hit an unfortunate, scary moment of vulnerability because a faulty power cord, a hill, and some rough cement have converged to leave the battery without quite enough juice, unless someone can give a little push. It could happen to anyone and, in fact, it does eventually happen to everyone.

We should not allow ourselves to be bogged down or derailed by supporting those who are not willing to support themselves, but we should not be opposed to giving a little push when it is genuinely needed, either. The ability to give that push is one of the very greatest things about being a person and we ought not go so far out of our way to train ourselves to do otherwise. “Mind your own business” and “do it yourself” simply do not work all the time. Even if I had “had some place to be” today, I was in the right place.

Mind the business that needs minding.