Me and the Fellas are on a thread around defining “who we are” by the “things that we do”. We volunteered at the ADA Walk, we try hard at practice even if in the common vocabulary of a six and eight year old, it is “boooooring”, etc, etc.
We just added a new rule, #23, which is “Whenever we have a sandwich, at home, at school, at a restaurant, we cut it in half and look for someone who might need it.” It can be someone struggling or just a friend who forgot to pack. This is a little bit “help others”, but mostly “make ‘looking to give help’ a habit”.
One of my favorite New York stories revolves around this theme. It was 2000 and I was working at Clickthebutton, bring the joy of real-time price comparison to millions of consumers. We had a low-level job called “matcher” that paid about $6/hour (and today with Mechanical Turk would cost 1/10th) and a rotating crew of semi-dependable shift workers staring at like-products for hours on end. One Thursday about nine of us were headed out for lunch and one of the three matchers asked “I’ve only got three bucks, can we go to McDonalds?” It was a block-and-half-walk, and as we waited in line, a struggling New Yorker was making his way up and down the queue asking if anybody could spare a buck for something to eat. My man the matcher reached into his pocket and gave this guy one of his three dollars.
I’m dropping the story line here. Instead of an epilogue detailing what happened next or inspired actions, this story ends at its most important point. When a human was at their greatest.