Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer: Crossing the Street (#701)

The restaurant district of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer was alive.

Tables spilled onto the pavement. Glasses of wine caught the evening light. Plates arrived and disappeared. Waiters threaded their way between tightly packed chairs. Conversations overlapped with laughter and the clatter of cutlery.

It was one of those wonderfully French scenes in which the distinction between restaurant and street seems almost to disappear.

And then I noticed the old man.

He was standing beside a wheelchair on the pavement, accompanied by an older woman.

She was trying to unfold the chair.

It wouldn't unfold.

She pulled at it. Shook it. Tried again.

The man could do nothing to help her. Age and infirmity had apparently taken that from him. He simply stood there, waiting, while she struggled with this awkward piece of machinery that had suddenly become essential.

I was across the street.

So I crossed.

There wasn't really a decision involved. I took hold of the wheelchair, found whatever mechanism was refusing to cooperate, and opened it. Together we helped the man lower himself into the seat. I positioned his feet on the footrests.

Then I shook his hand.

"Bonne soirée."

He smiled. The woman smiled.

And that should have been the end of it.

Except that I looked up.

A few feet away was a restaurant packed to overflowing. And, in the French fashion, many of the chairs on the terrace faced outward toward the street.

Toward us.

The people sitting in them had been watching.

And now they were looking at me.

Not smiling. Not nodding. Not offering that tiny expression of recognition that passes between strangers when one human being helps another.

Just looking.

For a moment, I had the peculiar sensation that I had done something extraordinary.

Or perhaps something inappropriate.

I felt almost as though I were an alien.

And that was what stayed with me.

Not the wheelchair.

Not the old man's infirmity.

Not even the woman's struggle.

It was the audience.

They had been only a few feet away.

Perhaps someone would eventually have helped.

Perhaps they assumed the woman had things under control.

Perhaps each person thought somebody else would intervene.

Perhaps, absorbed in dinner and conversation, they simply hadn't registered what was happening in front of them.

There are plenty of generous explanations.

Psychologists even have a name for one of them:

The bystander effect.

When several people witness someone needing assistance, responsibility can become strangely diluted.

Everyone sees the problem, but because everyone sees it, no individual feels quite as responsible for solving it.

Someone will help.

And sometimes nobody does.

But walking away, I realized there was another part of the story.

I felt wonderful.

Not proud, exactly. Certainly not heroic. I had unfolded a wheelchair. That was all.

But the old man's smile stayed with me.

So did hers.

And something had happened in that brief exchange that was much larger than the physical assistance I had provided.

We often think of giving as a transaction in which something moves in one direction.

The giver gives.

The recipient receives.

But perhaps that misunderstands giving completely.

Because very often the greatest beneficiary of an act of kindness is the person who performs it.

Give someone your money, your time, your attention, your seat, your hand - or thirty seconds on a pavement in Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer - and something comes back.

Not as repayment.

Not because anyone owes you anything.

It comes back as the quiet satisfaction of having been useful to another human being.

The old man got his wheelchair.

The woman got a little help.

I got my day made.

There is something almost paradoxical about that. We are told that generosity means putting someone else's needs before our own. And of course it does. But generosity is one of those rare human transactions in which giving something away can leave us with more than we had before.

Perhaps that is why small acts of kindness matter so much.

They connect us.

For a few seconds, three strangers who would almost certainly never meet again became part of one another's lives.

No names. No introductions. No obligation.

Just a wheelchair that wouldn't open, a woman who needed help, an old man who needed somewhere to sit, and somebody on the other side of the street who happened to notice.

We tend to imagine kindness as something substantial.

Generosity. Sacrifice. Charity. Heroism.

Most of the time it is nothing of the sort.

It is noticing. It is getting out of your chair. It is crossing the street.

And perhaps that is the lesson I took away from Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer.

When we see an opportunity to help someone, we sometimes hesitate because we wonder whether they need us, whether we might intrude, whether somebody else will do it.

Maybe we should think about it differently.

Cross the street. Offer the hand. Unfold the wheelchair.

You may help somebody else.

But don't be surprised if the person who walks away feeling best of all -

is you.

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