showing kindness to strangers

August 3, 2025

Some Random Observations That Don’t Tell You What To Do

Here we go:

  • There is strength in numbers. We feel better with the support of other like-minded people who also benefit from our presence.
  • My old friend Mel was a child during the Great Depression. He made no big deal of it because his father supported the family, and Mel never thought he was in any peril. He was a kid, after all. Surviving a calamitous time under favorable circumstances is not the same as experiencing the trouble of others.
  • Those under pressure benefit from our kindness and assistance. The Greeks have a long tradition of hospitality toward the stranger. It goes back to the time of Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey. This sacred duty is called Philoxenia, the opposite of Xenophobia, the fear of strangers.
  • You will be loved, but also betrayed, sometimes by the same person or people you thought to be friends.
  • The world of AI is a bit of a mystery, but it’s worth understanding what is known. This nonhuman, nonliving agent is a growing presence in our lives. Youval Harari, a brilliant public intellectual, is among those who speak intelligently on the subject. He is all over YouTube.
  • I was born in the luckiest historical moment and place in history for white people, just after World War II. Those born later, including my children, have encountered a less favorable set of conditions.
  • My mother used to say, “God helps those who help themselves.” She was not religious, though she prayed to my dad and her mother. Mom wanted to die and asked for their help in the several months she lived after my father passed away. Make what you will of that.

  • When my friend Joe, also a psychologist, was recovering from a heart attack, I stepped in for him with one of his challenging patients. She believed herself the most unfortunate person in world history. This woman expected special consideration from others as a result. Her sense of entitlement was part of her problem.
  • Most of the young and middle-aged do not understand the physical pain brought by old age. I sure didn’t. Better that you don’t.
  • Love and let yourself be loved. OK, I said I wouldn’t tell you to do something, but I couldn’t resist.
  • One of the problems created by the pandemic was skin hunger. We need human or animal physical contact, but not of the cannibal variety.
  • About 13 years ago, I learned how to read in a new way. Instead of judging the author after reading a bit, I tried to understand what the author intended without judgment. I was also instructed not to read background material or expert opinions and explanations of the book’s contents. I came to ponder how the human strengths and flaws portrayed in words might apply to my life, my decisions, and the human condition.
  • Are we free? That depends on how you define freedom, free will in particular. To some degree, we have become the prisoners of algorithms. These early AI interventions into our online lives keep track of what we choose to see and read, and provide us more of it. Included are media that enrages us and contribute to the virality of untruth and conspiracy theories. The only way to achieve freedom from this algorithmic effect is to dispose of our phones and computers. I haven’t heard of anyone who has made this choice.

  • Among my favorite old songs is “If I Had a Hammer,” as sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary. Appropriate for our time. I like “My Boyfriend’s Back,” which has nothing to do with a body part, and “Rock Around the Clock,” as performed by Bill Haley and the Comets. “In the Mood” is a big band favorite from before my time. It still puts me in the mood, meaning thoughts of romance with the woman I love. Then, of course, the instrumental masterpieces of Mahler, Brahms, Beethoven, etc.
  • The 1950s and ’60s offered a proliferation of cowboy TV shows and reruns of World War II movies, not to mention the TV version of Superman. Thereby, kids my age absorbed a simplified version of right and wrong. Native Americans were among the bad guys, a more than unfortunate and dishonest depiction. Nonetheless, the abstract moral principles led me to buy in. I later understood how the white men mistreated the natives, something I never learned in school. More recently, I discovered we no longer agree on right and wrong.
  • Among the most thoughtful action movies of the time was Abandon Ship. An ocean liner on a pleasure cruise strikes a naval mine, which explodes and sinks the ship. The lifeboat has inadequate supplies, and those clinging to it in the ocean lack enough shark repellent. The commanding officer faces a moral dilemma. He considers how to save everyone, an impossible task. The single alternative is to select the hardiest among them for a challenging journey. The rest are forcefully put in the water, resulting in certain death as they float away.
  • We live in a world of ideas. There are more movies, classic books, and transformative, exciting, and uplifting music than one can enjoy in a lifetime of learning, watching, and listening. A friend rereads many of the books he considers the most thoughtful and provocative. If we read such works, the greatest minds of human history still speak to us. They wait patiently for us to listen to their words.

Enough for today. Be well.

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The three images are sourced from Wikiart.org.

They are Thinking Thought Bubble by FreyaSyangila, Orangutan Thinking by Dmitry Rozhkov, and The Thinker by Auguste Rodin.

December 13, 2020

“The Best Meal I Had All Day” and Other Words of Wisdom

Emmanuel Terry, my Uncle Manny, is remembered by my brothers for something we heard from him whenever he came to dinner.

No matter the food he ate earlier, our gathering lacked completion until he said, “This was the best meal I had all day!” He smiled and we grinned at what became a necessary secular benediction at the evening’s conclusion.

Though we took his words as a joke, we might have better understood them as a true expression of appreciation, a thanksgiving for the feast and comradery of the moment.

Well before such festivities, Mr. Terry endured the Great Depression of the 1930s, psychiatric hospitalization, electroshock treatment, and service overseas in wartime. Late in life, he suffered the death of his wife, my Aunt Nettie. He knew loved ones and joyous reunions should not be taken for granted.

Uncle M. smiled a lot when we were together, drinking in the companionship and enjoying the laughter we all shared. And, yet, I am the inheritor of a few philosophy texts he read. Too bad I never thought to ask him what in those yellowed pages mattered to him.

Did they contribute to his gratitude?

This brings me to a friend (I’ll call him K), who is entering his 75th year on the planet, a bit longer than Manny achieved. On his birthday, the pandemic doing its worst, he wondered what he might wish for beyond the loving expressions of his children and friends.

While talking to his son-in-law a solution evolved. He planned to bestow some small benevolence on someone he didn’t know. But who, how? Close contact with people would risk lives, both his and the other.

K wasn’t deterred.

My buddy realized an acquaintance in another country might be useful in the endeavor. One owns an eatery in a city where bars and restaurants are open. He chose an establishment over 4000 miles away.

This longtime friend placed a call and asked the proprietor to serve a drink to every person in the place. His confidant would charge the tab to K.

The barkeep honored the anonymity desired by the benefactor of all the strangers. Thus the task was done.

My comrade suggested I take some similar action myself. I told him I would and, also write about his random act of kindness.

Perhaps you enjoyed a beer on my friend, but probably not. I’m guessing if he could have fed the world he would have. None of us can.

We can only do our small part.

Like Uncle Manny, K is a wise man and a grateful one.

It is no accident that these characteristics go together.

Such people make us better than we are.

———-

The adults flanking the young man at his bar mitzvah celebration are his Uncle Manny and Aunt Nettie. The gentleman seated at the right is George Fields. Yes, I am the boy in the middle. It was the best meal we had all day.