When a stranger needed help, my first reaction was…

A plumber came to the house and on the way out got himself stuck in a ditch.

My first thought was ungenerous, and I'll own it: he was careless, and I haven't got time to get involved in freeing his van.

Thirty minutes later it was the best thing I'd done all day.

He hadn't wanted to ask for help. His boss was down the phone giving him a hard time, someone would have to come out, the job would slip, the day was gone. He was embarrassed.

The relief when the van finally moved, after some wooden planks/tools/human strength were applied, was disproportionate to the effort it cost me. By a LONG way.

The interesting part isn't that helping felt good. That's the obvious ending, the interesting part is what my first reaction told me about how I'd started treating my own time: that a slot in the diary had become more real to me than the person standing in front of me. That anything unplanned was a tax on what I was supposed to be doing.

The plumber got out of the ditch. I got out of a mindset I'd been sitting in for weeks. Neither of us paid anything. The most time-consuming, least productive on paper thing I did that day was the one that changed it.