Paying Back The Karma...

Last week one of my brothers was involved in a pretty severe motorbike accident.  The driver of the car wasn't paying proper attention and crashed into him, sending him flying 20 feet through the air and landing on some railings.  Thankfully neither party was speeding and, thanks to his armoured bike jacket and helmet, my brother wasn't killed (although his right leg is pretty mashed up and is going to be held together by bits of metal for the rest of his life).  Still, in the grand scheme of things it could have been so, so much worse, and I am intensely grateful for that.

I'm also intensely grateful to the random strangers who stopped in the immediate aftermath of the crash to see what they could do to help.  The first person on the scene was an off-duty nurse, then some fellow-bikers turned up and there was one guy who stayed on the phone to my brother's mum the entire time from the moment he arrived on the scene to the moment they shipped Dan off to the trauma unit at the Royal London Hospital.  These people didn't know him from Adam but, because they were kind, decent human beings they stopped at what must have been a fairly horrendous scene and did what they could to help.  I don't know these people - hell, I'll probably never know them and they'll probably never read this - but I want to thank them anyway.  Their prompt actions and their kindness made a bad situation better, and I'll be forever grateful to them for that.

And, because the Grand Old Great Cosmic Universe has a funny way of pointing out your karmic footprint to you, today I had a chance to pay some of that debt back to it.  I was on my way to a meeting at the Children's Centre this afternoon when I spotted an elderly gentleman sitting on the pavement outside the shops opposite.  My brain immediately went into "holy crap, if he's having a heart attack do I even remember what to do?!!" mode, but I wandered over to him and asked, as politely as I could so as not to freak him out, if he was all right.  As it turns out, he was totally fine - he'd dropped his car keys under the rear of the car while putting something in the boot and had just managed to fish them back out as I passed - but I'm glad I checked.  I mean, if he had been having a heart attack there's no way I could have done anything except call an ambulance, but I like to think I would have done so (and then run around like a headless chicken afterwards!!)

So - the moral of this story is that even though the world currently seems full of really awful, horrible people doing truly terrible things, sometimes it pays to remember that there are still good, kind, decent people out there.  And that, sometimes, you have to be one of those people in order to help tip the balance in favour of the good stuff.  We could all go over to the Dark Side pretty easily (more by being selfish and not helping others rather than by going all Darth Vader and massacring entire planets for fun), but sometimes something will happen to remind us there is another option...