The good neighbor
To stop or to climb
1.
Maybe I could squeak this out, M thought. Earlier he had been out in the trails on his mountain bike. On his way back into town, a flat tire got him.
He could not squeak this out. He was supposed to meet me for drinks and he was going to be late. He pulled over to the side of the highway.
M is sixty-two years old, with three children in college and a proud career in sales. While unloading his gear to retrieve the spare tire, he counted at least a dozen cars that drove by. He recognized many of them, he told me later, he knew their owners. In their small American town these were the professors, physicians, administrators, real estate agents, project managers, bank branch supervisors that he ran into at farmer’s markets, fundraisers, potlucks, PTA meetings, the produce section at Kroger. He had even passed a few of them on the trail a couple hours ago and they happily stopped to chat about their kids’ lives and Saturday Night Football. There was no doubt they had seen M, stalled, blinkers flashing.
None of them stopped. Not an offer to assist, not a pause to check in, not even a wave of recognition. They drove right on by.
2.
“Who is my neighbor?” asked Jesus in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The parable begins with a journeyman traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. He is ambushed by robbers and left for dead. A priest passes and does not stop. A Levite walks by and continues on his way. Finally, a Samaritan encounters the scene and leaps into action. He cleans and bandages the injured man’s wounds, then carries him to the nearest inn, where the Samaritan pays for his companion’s care. The good neighbor, Jesus said, is the man who stops.
In 1973, social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson conducted a study to investigate why some people help strangers, and others do not. They called it the Good Samaritan experiment. 67 students from the Princeton Theological Seminary were assigned into two groups. One group was informed that they were late for a sermon; the other was told they had plenty of time. On their way to the church, the students encountered a man in distress. In the unhurried group, nearly two-thirds of the students stopped to help. Among the hurried students, only ten percent did. The other ninety percent rushed by.
In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, we are presented with a moral ideal: someone who puts others above himself, and himself above hypocrisy. But the Good Samaritan experiment suggests otherwise. Perhaps stopping to help a stranger has less to do with the values we believe we hold, and more to do with the culture that holds us. As the pace of our days accelerate, perhaps ethics becomes a luxury we find we cannot afford.
3.
Once, there was a small caterpillar named Stripe who came into the world upon the leaves of a tall and friendly tree. The tree sheltered and fed the caterpillar, who grew bigger and stronger. One day, Stripe decided there must be more to life than eating and growing. He said goodbye to his home and left to roam the fields. Soon he encountered other crawlers just like himself, and he followed them until they came upon a great pillar in the distance, rising so high it dissolved into the clouds.
When they arrived at the pillar’s base, Stripe was shocked to discover that it was a giant column of caterpillars, thousands of them shaking and squirming, shimmering toward the sky. Stripe felt a surge of excitement. He asked another crawler, “Do you know what’s happening?”
“Nobody has time to explain,” the other caterpillar said. “They’re so busy trying to get wherever they’re going—up there.”
“But what’s at the top?”
“No one knows that either. But it must be awfully good because everybody’s rushing there. Goodbye—I’ve no more time!”
Stripe had no idea where everyone was going but the drive inside him was intoxicating. He felt certain that whatever he was looking for, he would find it at the top. He plunged into the pile.
4.
“When I get up, I ask what do I have to do today?” an Italian merchant wrote in 1433. “So many things. I count them, think about them, and to each I assign its time.”
For most of human history, time followed the continuous cycles of nature: movements of the moon and stars, shadows tracing a sundial, water slipping through a clepsydra. People were accustomed to the slow, seasonal rhythms of agrarian living—“free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity,” wrote the medievalist Jacques Le Goff.
The first mechanical clocks were assembled by monastic clergy during the latter half of the Middle Ages. Cistercian monks worshiped a God who did not favor tardiness; strict schedules of prayer required a consistent measurement of time. Swinging weights were fashioned to the bells on a church tower, and the new technology swiftly fanned outward, filling public squares with the tolling of bells and carving of time into ever-finer slices for the start and end of work, meal breaks, assemblies, drink service, street cleaning, council meetings, close of market, curfew and all the newly minted demands of big and small towns proliferating across Europe.
The next revolution came with miniaturization. With the invention of timepieces small enough to carry on the person, time moved away from the collective stream into the province of private management. Time was no longer something to be perceived; it was something to be tracked and controlled. Time entered your house, your pocket, your mind; she became the companion on every trip. Time began to acquire the same properties as money—a currency to be saved, spent, stored, stolen, squandered, seized—with professionals of all stripes folding to the new regime, carefully documenting their use of time for the purpose of calculating fees. The ticking watch summoned the entirety of our conscious lives, submitting each moment for review from an ever-present, ever-monitoring judge.
5.
Inside the pillar the kicks and claws of other climbers came from every direction. Stripe learned quickly: he could climb or be climbed. He had no choice but to push ahead. He found that the more he focused on his own trajectory, ignoring the slips and setbacks of others, the more ground he could gain. He was getting better at it. But after a while, he began to have doubts. Where are we going? What are we doing this for? He tried to slap away those thoughts, but they kept reappearing, a little louder each time. Where are we going? What are we doing this for? One day, he lost his temper and shouted back, “I don’t know but there’s no time to think about it!”
The outburst startled a small, yellow caterpillar underneath him. She gave Stripe a funny look and Stripe suddenly felt self-conscious. But Yellow was actually wondering the same thing, and she had wondered this for so long that she decided the question wasn’t important. The two of them did not yet know that it was their destiny to become butterflies, to fly and love and live among flowers and spread the seeds of creation. But in order to transform they first had to stop climbing. They had to leave the pillar behind and enter their cocoons; they had to desire flying so much they were willing to give up everything they knew about being a caterpillar who only crawled and climbed.
Stripe and Yellow did not yet see that this was the only way to become their full selves. And so they suppressed their confusion and steeled their resolve, and they began to climb anew, stepping over other climbers and over each other, clamoring toward a destination they could not fathom atop a column that made no sense.
6.
Eventually two cars did stop for M.
The first was an aged white Impala, engine coughing, a chunk missing from its side mirror. The driver was pale and skinny. Tattoos trailed up his arms, peeking above his neckline. “You need a hand down there?” His wife poked out a cigarette to ash it.
M smiled. “I’ll be alright. Thanks for checking.” He noticed two young kids in the back. One had a pizza box on his lap; the other was twirling around a lollipop. “We just got back from Trick-or-Treating,” the man said. “We’ll just be gettin’ home then.”
The second car was a rusty pick-up, mud specking its bedsides. It came to a stop ten yards behind M. Their hazard lights clicked in concert. A big-bellied man stepped out. He was in his fifties, with a gray-brown beard and slight limp.
M lived in a small town on the edge of Appalachia. Neat lawns and flower beds clustered in the neighborhoods within city limits; poverty spread through the backroads beyond. When he told me what happened over drinks, he admitted the reflexive judgments that were forming in his mind—just as I was sensing my own. From the view of coastal media centers, Appalachians was a target for contempt and ridicule. It was tempting to grab at familiar labels: hick, hillbilly, redneck, bumpkin.
M waved to the man as he approached.
“I’m just finishing up here. No need to stop.”
It was getting dark. The man planted his feet in the gravel. His voice was calm and steady.
“You go on and take your time. But you can’t tell me to go. I’ll just park here with my lights on ‘til I see you’re on your way.”
Then he went back inside his truck and did just that.
7.
The writer George Packer has said we live in four Americas. There is the Free America of laissez-faire libertarians; the Smart America of economically mobile elites; the Real America of traditional, primarily rural workers; and the Just America of younger passionate progressives.
I wondered if the math might be simpler.
There is the hurried class, pressing ever forward, fearful of getting left behind. And there is the unhurried class, who remain in place because they never bought into the compulsion to leave. In our age of accelerations, there are still those among us who choose rootedness over advancement, who place people above productivity, and who make the decision to stop instead of climb. 🎨
This combination of nonfiction and fiction vignettes tickled my brain and soul in the best way. Thank you for this gift to slow down and step back from the madness
I long to belong to the unhurried class.