A peel and a peony and small acts

A good friend and I took a walk the other day. The morning chill had given way to the warmth of the early June sun, so there were many people out walking or running. As we headed up the crest of a hill, I noticed a banana peel in the middle of the sidewalk, so I kicked it to the grassy area to the side to minimize the chance that other walkers or runners might slip on it and fall.

No big deal. We continued on our walk, interrupted only briefly for a couple of cups of coffee grabbed at a nearby shop.

It was good to catch up with my friend, but I was surprised by his text shortly after our walk.

“Here’s one small thing I noticed today,” he wrote. “I, like 999 out of 1,000 people, walked around the banana peel on the sidewalk today. You picked it up and put it to the side so no one slipped on it.”

My friend took this as a sign of how unusually caring a person I am. His note made me feel good, of course. Who doesn’t like to be thought of as caring? I didn’t know he noticed my kicking the peel to the side, but I’m not convinced it was all that unusual. My friend’s eyesight is not all that great, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he hadn’t even seen the peel. And it wasn’t like I took the time to put the peel in the trash or find some compost bin into which to toss it. As caring acts go, kicking a discarded piece of fruit to the side seems low-effort.

I’m reminded regularly that in spite of a lot of noise suggesting otherwise, people do make an effort to care for one another. A few days after that walk, the woman I’d eat bees for and I returned home after a torrential downpour. We noticed that several of her recently bloomed peony plants looked like they had been trampled. She clipped off the flowers, cleaned up some of the mess, and thought nothing more of it.

That evening our neighbor rang our doorbell and apologized for the trampled peonies. It turns out that the roofers he hired had been a little too aggressive in tossing old roofing off of his house and some of it caught the wind and landed squarely on the plants. He didn’t have to come clean since we would have continued to believe that nature and not a roofer was the culprit. He offered to pay for the plants, but the plants weren’t dead and they will return next year. Nancy could have responded angrily, I suppose, but she offered him some peonies and we used his visit as an opportunity to catch up a bit.

A thoughtlessly discarded banana peel and a trampled peony plant are not earth-shattering events. It is, however, sometimes such seemingly minor things that allow us to choose to do the right thing even when no one is looking.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. 

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin

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