A young woman is about to cross a busy city street. It is evening. Rush hour. People are bustling, cabs and cars are trying to break free of gridlock, steam rises from an underground vent as a subway rumbles beneath the crowded sidewalk and corner. The young woman has had a stressful day. She has not had a chance to stop to eat since breakfast and now she is headed for an engineering class at the university and she is running late. She does not see the young man on a bicycle. He is about her age, is dressed in less fashionable clothing, and is pedaling furiously. A courier, he is not late as much as he is motivated to deliver the package in the satchel slung over his left shoulder. If he delivers it before the top of the hour, he will have a perfect delivery record for the day. That perfect record will earn him a bonus. The light is changing. If he makes the light, he can make an opening in traffic that he spies ahead, a gap that will help him arrive earlier than expected. So the courier runs the red light. He does this just as the engineering student steps toward the street when the crossing sign indicates that she and the small crowd around her can safely do so.
A hand darts from the mix of people and grabs the young woman’s elbow. The hand has fat fingers and swollen knuckles. It belongs to an elderly woman.
The engineering student whirls, one hand on her purse. The courier on the bike swerves into the intersection. A taxi honks. The crowd inhales. The eyes of the young woman meet those of the elderly woman.
“That was close,” someone mutters.
The young woman’s eyes are wide. The elderly woman’s eyes are wide also. She smiles. This was one of her life’s purposes.
And then everyone continues. And everything continues. On time.
Whose life is most affected by the stranger’s outstretched hand? We don’t know. But the bonus that the young courier received allowed him to pay the back rent on his apartment. And that extra month in the apartment was enough time for him to finish the demo tape for the jazz fusion concerto that he was composing.
Small events. Big consequences.
Most events in life do not feel dramatic. That may be because we simply don’t know where those actions take place in the causal continuum of actions and reactions in which we are enveloped.
It is nice, isn’t it, to think that we are born for important things, that we have purpose. As embodied identities, we tend to imagine such purpose as something grand, memorable. A timeless book. A scientific discovery. Ascendency in a career. Recognition from peers.
Yet suppose each of our lives was meant for a series of small, discrete purposes rather than a single large achievement. Suppose our roles in the flow of humanity rely on sets of specific tasks, a group of activities or interventions that might or might not be done at unique moments in time. It may not seem existentially dramatic to hear that an elderly woman delayed an engineering student just long enough to avoid being hit by a musician moonlighting as a courier. Would you be more impressed if you learned that the courier’s jazz tape landed him a recording contract? Or that the engineering student was a budding genius in the field of 3D printing of human organs? Or that two other people in the crowd who observed the old woman’s action decided that very night, independent to each other (as they did not know each other), to devote the remainder of their careers to community-focused pursuits and that their companies, by complete happenstance, years later co-launched an early warning system that was used to save an entire coastal area in India from a devastating flood?
It feeds my ego to think that I am destined for great things, such as a leadership role that is transformative or accomplishments that will make a so-called difference. If there is destiny, give me the kind with a capital ‘D’. Offer me a life that will be favorably remembered.
For most of us, including me, it probably doesn’t work that way. Rather than big “D” destiny, there is a myriad of small “f” fate, unique actions that happen at specific points in time without which the arc of history would be different, the path of someone’s life – a single individual – would be permanently altered, and the world would be less of the place it might otherwise be.
How lucky we are to live in an elaborate nexus of being in which our kindness to each other today leads to unimaginable consequences in a series of better tomorrows. Take the case of old woman who grabbed the younger woman’s elbow at the busy street corner. She now sews reusable masks and gowns for the staff at the local hospital. She herself was once a nurse. She went into that career decades earlier after a stranger unexpectedly handed her a pamphlet that had fallen from her knapsack. The then student hadn’t meant to take the pamphlet at the career fair she had intended. Still, after the pamphlet-extending stranger mentioned that a nurse had once saved his father’s life, the now old-once-was-young woman decided to take another look at the program. Five years later, as a young nurse herself, she decided outside of protocol to check the blood pressure for a pregnant woman. The screening saved both woman and unborn child. That child was born healthy and grew to marry a woman who had emigrated to this country from another land in a different hemisphere. The couple’s daughter herself had a son who took a job as an inner-city bike courier to pay his living expenses while he worked on a jazz fusion demo tape.
One song on that recording became an international hit.