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Last month’s Substack essay “In Search of Kindness” follows up here with acts of kindness observed.

I was recently visiting my old neighborhood in London where I used to live, walking down High Street Kensington on a sunny July day. The High Street was bustling with people—residents, tourists, children, darting in and out of the High Street Kensington tube station and in and out of shops and hurrying on to their next destinations. I was on my way to a favorite restaurant when a diminutive woman in a loose blue shirt caught my eye. I was walking behind her. She had short grey hair and was slightly bent over, a person you might not notice, except I noticed that when she passed an elderly man folded into a doorway with a paper cup in front of him, she reached into her purse, took out several coins and went over to him and dropped them into his cup. No one else had noticed him.

Half a block later another elderly man with a full gray beard sat in the corner of a building on the High Street playing tentatively on a guitar. Again, she reached into her purse and made the effort to move across the insistent flow of pedestrians and dropped a few coins into his guitar case. No one else was stopping. This was not the mission of her outing, but she paused and took note of these people then went on her way.

I was certain she would do the same for the next itinerant down the block. I stepped up beside her and said, “You’re a good woman. I saw you helping.” She looked over at me surprised that I’d noticed then she smiled. “It isn’t going to hurt me to give a little,” she said.

“You saw them and showed that you cared,” I observed. She appreciated this insight.

“They are often here,” she said. Our conversation wasn’t long, and she went her way into the shops.

I had no coins, living as we do now by credit cards, not cash, but I went into the next shop and got cash and filled my own pocket with coins. I think we both understood that these coins would not solve the problems of unemployment or homelessness, or perhaps even be able to change much the circumstances of those who’d slipped into the corners of the street, but the gesture at least showed that they were seen. Those few who were also playing musical instruments—guitars and violins which perhaps were once tools of their trade—also shared music with the street as pedestrians rushed by.

One cannot fund all who find refuge on street corners these days. And it is important in giving not to be funding habits of drugs, but many have simply fallen out of the system of employment or social services. The larger societal answers are left to those who work in social service organizations or government agencies. I recognize that giving a few coins or bills is neither the answer nor everyone’s responsibility, but I also noticed how few in the hundreds rushing by paused or noticed. Have we gotten numb to hardship, perhaps even annoyed by it, even receptive to those who blame the victims?

While in London, I went to the theatre and saw a play “Till the Stars Come Down” about a Midlands English family wedding where the prejudice is against the Polish groom in a town where coal mines have closed. At one point the Polish groom says to his unemployed and prejudiced brother-in-law to whom he’s offered a job: “You need to decide if you’re a victim or superior because you can’t be both.” The play’s theme threads through the story and characters, demonstrating the corrosive nature of prejudice which can hollow out the heart, feelings and human spirit, whether that prejudice is racial, national, religious, or…

The same day I observed the elderly woman reaching into her purse on the High Street, a news story was reported out of France about a caretaker at a public middle school in Paris who arrived home tired after a week of work, but instead of resting heard a fire alarm nearby and went to check it out. There he spotted a woman and her children trapped by the fire calling for help. He climbed onto a ledge of the sixth floor where he took the children from the burning building one by one and got everyone, including two infants and the mother—six people—to safety.

He scaled the building to help. “I went on instinct,” he said. “It’s the heart telling you, ‘No, you have to go.’”

It is the heart telling you.