I think you can learn more about a person's actual character from the version of them that exists when no one is documenting it than from almost anything else available to observe.
This has become something close to a private test I apply, mostly to myself. Would I still do this if there were no possibility anyone would ever know I had done it? Would I still show up, distribute the meals, have the conversation, if there were no website, no journal, no record at all — if the entire thing existed only in the moment it happened and then vanished from memory the second it was over?
I want to be able to answer yes to that question. I am not certain I always could have, earlier in my life, before I had spent enough time actually doing this work to know what it felt like from the inside. But somewhere in the repetition, doing it the same way week after week regardless of whether anyone was tracking it, the question stopped being theoretical and started being something I had actual evidence for. I have shown up on plenty of days when documenting it would have required more effort than it was worth, and I showed up anyway, because by that point the showing up had become the point, not the record of it.
I think this matters more broadly than just as a personal test. I think an organization's actual values are most visible in whatever it does when no one is measuring it — the version of the work that never makes it into a report, an essay, a statistic. If I'm honest, most of what the Foundation actually does will never appear anywhere on this website, not because we're hiding it, but because most of it isn't the kind of thing that translates into content. A returned visit. A name remembered. A small kindness extended without ceremony. These things resist documentation almost by their nature.
I have started to think that's correct, actually — that the most meaningful version of this work might be the version that never gets written about at all, and that the writing, including this essay, is at best a faint shadow of the actual thing.
From the archive
The Stranger I Never Forgot