I do not know his name. I met him for perhaps four minutes, years ago, and I have thought about him more times than I can count since.
It was early on, before any of this had a name or a structure, when I was still doing this informally, alone, without anyone else involved. I had brought food to an area I had visited a few times before. Most people took the food and moved on, which was completely appropriate — they had no obligation to make conversation with me, and I never expected it. This one man stayed.
He asked me why I was doing this. I gave some version of an honest answer, something about gratitude, about having had more than I needed. He listened, and then he said something I have never been able to shake, paraphrased now because I don't trust my memory to have preserved his exact words after this many years, but close to this: that most people who help only see the helping. They never see the person standing in front of them as someone with a life before this moment and a life after it, just as someone receiving something. He said he didn't think I was doing that, which was why he'd stopped to talk. Then he thanked me, in a way that felt less like gratitude for the meal and more like gratitude for the four minutes themselves, and he left, and I never saw him again.
I do not know what happened to him. I do not know if he is still alive. I have gone back to that same area more times than I could count, hoping without much expectation that I would run into him again, and I never have.
What I took from those four minutes was not really about food distribution at all. It was a kind of correction, delivered by exactly the person most qualified to deliver it, about what the actual point of any of this is supposed to be. Not the meal. Not even the help, exactly. The four minutes. The being seen as a whole person rather than a recipient. I think about him every time I am tempted to move quickly through a distribution, treating it as a task to complete rather than a series of individual encounters that each deserve their own four minutes.
From the archive
Success Is Not What I Thought It Was