The Burrito & The Fable: A lesson in kindness #459)

On burrito nights, I don’t really cook.

I drive to a small restaurant, stand in line with everyone else, and order dinner in foil and paper. Burritos for home.

For a long time, that was the whole story.

Then I started noticing a man who spends most evenings on the sidewalk nearby.

Homeless? Unhomed?

I still fumble for the right word. Labels never feel big enough for a whole human life. He sits with a backpack, sometimes with a plastic bag of belongings, sometimes with nothing at all.

People pass by. Some avert their eyes. Some don’t see him at all.

One evening, almost without thinking, I said, “Can you make one more burrito?”

I walked outside, handed it to him, and he smiled with a kind of quiet surprise that made me suddenly aware of how rare this must be.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Take care,” I replied, and walked back to my car.

It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t fix anything about his situation. But as I drove home with my dinner on the seat beside me, I realized something simple and slightly uncomfortable:

It made me feel good.

And that, in a way, is where Aesop walks in.

Aesop’s fables are full of tiny acts with outsized meaning: a mouse gnawing through a hunter’s net, a lion sparing a small creature who later saves his life. The gestures are small, almost trivial in the moment. But each one carries a thread that runs forward:

Consequences. Connections. Transformation.

My burrito habit has quietly turned into a kind of modern fable I tell myself once or twice a month:

A person went out to buy dinner.

Each time they bought one extra burrito.

Not out of heroism.

But because it felt like the right thing to do.

And, because it made them feel more human.

In the old fables, the moral is spelled out at the end, just in case you missed it.

In this one, the moral has been slower to emerge.

At first, I thought the lesson was simply:

Be kind. Share what you have.

But the more I repeat the ritual, the more I realize the story is also about the uncomfortable truth that kindness is not entirely selfless.

It’s intertwined with our own need to feel useful, to feel like we’re not just walking past suffering with our eyes down.

Aesop might smile at that. His stories never pretend that we are saints. They simply suggest that small, decent choices matter anyway.

There’s a temptation to pretend that acts of kindness are pure, that they are entirely about the other person. In reality, there is a quiet transaction going on.

He gets a hot meal.

I get a reminder that I can still do something small and tangible in a world that often feels vast and indifferent.

Is that selfish? Maybe partly. But perhaps the better question is:

What do we do with that feeling?

If the good feeling becomes the only goal, kindness can slide toward performance.

Doing things that look kind rather than things that are kind.

But if that warmth in the chest becomes fuel for more small acts, then it becomes something closer to Aesop’s wisdom: a habit, a character trait, a way of moving through the world.

The burrito is gone in ten minutes. The story we are both in lasts longer.

Language matters here.

I still catch myself thinking of him as the homeless guy near the burrito place. It’s functional shorthand, but it also freezes him in the narrowest frame of his life. His housing status.

Over time, the ritual nudged me to something gentler. I began to see him as a sort of unintended neighbor. I don’t know his full story. How he ended up there, what he loves, who he misses, what he fears. But I know this: on certain evenings, my path and his path cross at a tiny intersection of need and surplus.

I have a car, a warm bed, and the ability to buy extra food without it hurting me.

He has a need for calories, for warmth, and perhaps for something even more basic: to be seen, not stepped around.

So now I try to do one thing in addition to the burrito: I look him in the eye. I say hello. I ask how he’s doing.

Not every time becomes a conversation. Sometimes he’s tired, or I’m in a hurry, or the moment is awkward. But the thread of recognition - I see you - has become as important as the food itself.

And again, I hear Aesop whispering: the moral isn’t that the lion saves the mouse, or the burrito solves homelessness.

It’s that we are changed by the act of seeing and being seen.

We tend to talk about kindness in big, cinematic terms: heroic rescues, life-changing generosity, dramatic sacrifice. Those things matter. But most of the world is quietly held together by smaller, less Instagrammable actions:

• The neighbor who brings in your trash cans when you forget.

• The friend who checks in after the test or the surgery or the funeral.

• The stranger who lets you merge in traffic when you really should’ve planned ahead.

• And yes, the extra burrito handed to someone sitting alone on a cold sidewalk.

  
  

These acts don’t make headlines, but they do something just as important: they reshape us.

They soften the edges of our impatience, our fear, our constant rush toward the next item on the list. They remind us we are connected, whether we like it or not.

Kindness, in that sense, is less a grand moral achievement and more a daily practice, like brushing your teeth or stretching your back. Skip it long enough, and something is lost. Something starts to hurt.

The Aesop Test

If I were to turn this into an Aesop-style fable, it might go like this:

A person went to buy dinner. Each time they saw the man sitting outside, they felt uneasy.

One day, they bought an extra burrito and handed it to him. The man ate. The giver smiled.

The world did not change. But something inside the giver did.

The moral of the story?

Kindness may not fix everything, but it keeps us from becoming the person

who no longer tries.

That, I think, is the real lesson.

We are surrounded by problems much bigger than burritos: poverty, addiction, mental illness, housing shortages, broken systems. It’s easy to feel paralyzed by the scale of it all and decide that if we can’t solve everything, we shouldn’t bother doing anything.

Aesop would disagree. His fables are practical, almost stubbornly modest.

They don’t say: You must rescue the whole world.

They do say: Do the good that is in front of you, and let it shape who you are becoming.

So now, on my designated cook nights, I stand at the counter and say:

Two burritos, please. Actually - make that three.

It’s a tiny luxury of my life that I can do this. It is also a thread that ties my comfortable evening to someone else’s harder one. And every time I hand over that warm paper bag, I feel both the awkwardness and the rightness of the act.

I don’t know if this will ever grow into more. Learning his name. Helping in other ways. Supporting organizations that tackle the systemic issues. Maybe it will. Maybe the burrito is just the first step.

But I do know this:

On those nights, I walk back to my car feeling more human, not because I’ve done something impressive, but because I’ve remembered the simple truth Aesop kept writing about:

We are all, in one way or another, mice and lions, givers and receivers,

needing each other far more than we like to admit.

I am reminded of the well-known Aesop quote about kindness:

No act of kindness,

No matter how small,

Is ever wasted.

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