The Kindness of Strangers

I have always had a rather negative view of other human beings and have reflected on that in a number of my posts in the past year or so. Then, on an otherwise unremarkable June day, well apart from the temperature, I was forced to do some significant rethinking.

I went up to town to do some shopping as I often do, even though Janet had told me to wait until she got home and the temperature was lower. The shopping went normally and I started to walk home. One minute I was heading down a street at my normal pace and the next minute I was on my side having fallen very heavily. There was no time to react but I must have done instinctively because I fell on my right side rather than face first. However, I still gave my nose and my cheek a significant bang and my nose was bleeding freely. As I tried to figure out what happened a couple who had witnessed my fall came over to help me up. They made sure I was lucid, which I was despite the shock, and asked me where I lived, and whether anyone would be there. I told them, thinking that they were just making sure I could get home once I had recovered. Next thing I know my shopping was in their car, I was in the back seat trying not to bleed on their upholstery and they were driving me home. They asked which house I lived in and drove onto my driveway. I was incredibly grateful and, although dazed, was able to express that gratitude.

If it hadn’t been for that lovely couple I would probably have been determined to struggle home on my own which would have done me little good. Just under a fortnight later I have recovered much of my confidence for walking although I am still tense whenever I prepare to go out. The bruises are slowly fading but what will never fade is the memory of true kindness of the sort that I often told readers was the exception not the rule. If that was really the case the couple who drove me home and the others who came to check on me were many of those exceptions in a very small area. I now accept I was wrong. People are fundamentally kind, whatever the media tells us, and I have first hand experience of that.