A woman put my bag in the back of a van that was not hers, spoke to the driver for about fifteen seconds, waved off the note I was holding out, and walked back into a building. I did not get her name. The driver took me eleven kilometres to a junction where a bus actually stopped, and he also would not take anything, and when I got out he had already pulled away before I had finished saying the one word I had.
That was maybe four years ago and I still do not know what to do with it.
Trying to count
I sat down once and tried to make a list of the people who have solved something for me and got nothing back. The list went past thirty before I got bored of my own handwriting, and the striking thing was how few of the entries had names attached.
A man who reversed his car three hundred metres down a track because I had walked up the wrong one. A woman at a counter who noticed I had misread a timetable and came out from behind the counter to say so. Two teenagers who walked me to a door and then went back the way they had come, which I only realised afterwards had been the wrong way for them. Somebody’s grandmother who filled my bottle without being asked and looked at me with the specific expression of a person who has decided you are not eating enough.
Individually tiny. Collectively, an enormous unpaid balance, distributed across people I will never see again and mostly could not identify.
Money mostly does not work
My first instinct is always to pay, and it is usually the wrong instinct, and it took a fair number of awkward moments to learn why.
Offering money for a favour reclassifies the favour. What was one person helping another becomes a transaction that was, until that moment, unpriced, and the person is now being told what their kindness was worth, by a stranger, in public. I have watched somebody’s face close over a held out note more than once.
There are exceptions and they are not subtle. If a person has driven a vehicle, fuel is a real cost and it is fine to insist a bit. If somebody has taken time off work, that is a cost. But the general case, the fifteen seconds of speaking to a driver, is not a case where money is the right unit.
What sometimes works instead: buying the thing they sell. If a person who helped me has a shop, I go and buy from the shop, at the normal price, without making a speech about it. That keeps the shape right.
The gift problem
I went through a period of carrying small things to give, and I have mostly stopped. It felt good and I think it was largely for me.
The issue is that a gift produced from a bag arrives with a slight implication that I anticipated needing to settle up, which means I anticipated being helped, which puts the whole encounter into a category the other person did not choose. It also creates a reciprocal obligation in a direction nobody wanted. Twice I have had somebody try to give me something back, immediately, out of a shop they clearly could not spare it from, and that was a worse outcome than doing nothing.
What I still do carry is a pen, because pens get used and given away naturally in exactly the conversations this article is about, and nobody experiences a pen as a gesture.
Photographs are not a payment
I want to say this one plainly because I got it wrong for a long time. Taking somebody’s photograph and sending it to them later is not a repayment. It is a thing I wanted, plus an errand for them.
I have offered it many times, in the form of asking for an address or a number so I can send the picture on. Sometimes people want it and then it is genuinely nice. But I noticed that I was reaching for the camera specifically at the moments when I felt most indebted, which means the camera was doing something for my discomfort rather than for them, and a person who has just helped you should not also have to hold a pose while you resolve your feelings.
Now I ask afterwards, separately, with no connection to the favour, and I accept no as the answer more quickly than I used to.
What the balance actually seems to be
The only framing that has ever made sense of this to me came from something a man said while I was trying to give him money for a lift. I understood roughly a third of the sentence and the third I understood was a word for road, and a gesture that took in the road behind and the road ahead.
I have decided, possibly wrongly, that it meant something like: this is not between you and me. I am not going to claim I know what he meant. But the reading has been useful, because it says the debt is not personal and cannot be settled personally, which matches my experience exactly.
So I do the only thing that seems consistent. I stop for people. I answer questions in my own city at length, including the ones that are slightly annoying, from people who are obviously lost and slightly embarrassed about it. I have given three lifts to junctions. It is not repayment, because the people I owe are not the people I am helping, and the ledger does not work that way.
The one I would repay if I could
If I got one, it would be the woman with the van. Not because it was the largest favour but because it was the most casual. She did it in fifteen seconds, on her way back inside, in the middle of her own afternoon, for somebody she would never see again and had no reason to think about twice.
That casualness is the part I cannot get over. It means it was not a special act. It means she probably does it constantly and does not count, and would find this entire piece of writing baffling.
I have no way of telling her that a stranger has thought about her fifteen seconds several hundred times. That is fine. It is not information she needs. It is just information I apparently have to carry, and writing it down is the closest I am going to get to putting it somewhere.