Springer's Journey

Something happened to me this week that I am still trying to wrap my head around.

And naturally, because I am me, I have decided it involves mathematics. 😂

Cora needs an alternator.

For those who haven’t been following our adventures, Cora is my Subaru and a full-fledged member of Springer’s Journey. She and I have been through quite a bit together lately, including one breakdown that very nearly convinced me I couldn’t keep doing this.

Then a man here at the campground heard about Cora.

He’s a certified mechanic.

And he offered to replace her alternator for me.

No labor charge.

Just go get the alternator, he said, and he’d put it in.

ARE YOU SERIOUS??!!

I hugged him.

I shook his hand.

I probably thanked him seventeen times.

And because receiving kindness can sometimes be surprisingly difficult, I immediately started trying to figure out how I could repay him.

Then this morning, the story changed again.

He has to leave the campground sooner than expected. There isn’t enough time for me to wait until payday to buy the alternator.

So he came up with another plan.

He is going to pay for the alternator.

He’ll install it in Cora before he leaves.

And when I have the money?

I am NOT to give it back to him.

Instead, I am to find someone here at the campground who could use some help and give the money to them.

I sat there thinking about that for a while.

Because that’s when I realized:

This isn’t repayment.

It’s multiplication.

One person helps me.

Instead of returning that help to him, I pass it to another person.

Maybe someday that person is in a position to help someone else.

And suddenly something that should have ended with two people doesn’t end at all.

I’ve spent a good portion of my life fascinated by relationships in science.

Cause and effect.

Energy moving from one form to another.

Systems interacting with other systems.

I’ve learned that sometimes the most important thing isn’t memorizing the individual pieces.

It’s understanding the relationship between them.

Maybe kindness works that way too.

Ordinary arithmetic tells us that if I have something and give part of it away, I should have less.

But kindness seems to operate under a very peculiar set of mathematical rules.

You give some away…

and somebody else has more.

They give some away…

and somebody else has more.

Pretty soon, we’re not dealing with subtraction anymore.

We’re looking at exponential growth. ❤️

And I think perhaps the most beautiful part is that I don’t have to find the perfect person to help.

Nobody asked me to prove that I deserved help.

Nobody handed me an application.

A person simply saw a place where he could make someone’s road a little easier and said:

“I can help with that.”

Now he’s trusting me to do the same.

So somewhere down the road, another person is going to receive a little unexpected kindness because Cora needed an alternator.

Think about that.

A broken car part started a chain reaction.

And this old science teacher finds that absolutely fascinating. 🥹

Apparently, at 65 years old, I have discovered an entirely new branch of mathematics.

THE MATHEMATICS OF KINDNESS

Where giving doesn’t necessarily leave you with less.

Where subtraction somehow becomes multiplication.

And where the answer to:

“How much kindness do we have?”

may simply be:

Let’s give some away and find out. ❤️☀️

Polished with help from ChatGPT, who is currently attempting to explain to Mayday Murphy that there will be no logarithms on the exam. 😂