A few years ago I worked in a project for homeless people.

There was one young man in his early twenties whom we had all
been very worried about. He had absolutely no one in his life. His
father was in prison for murder. His mother had been a drug addict.
When he was six years old he was placed in foster care because
teachers noticed that he was coming to school in dirty clothes. It
transpired 揭露 that he was being abused 虐待 by his mother’s
boyfriend. He spent the rest of his childhood in and out of children’s
homes. His mother had died a few years previously of a drug
overdose. He had no qualifications, nothing going for him in life. He
started using drugs, got kicked out of the hostel he was living in and
ended up homeless.

When you work with homeless people, you hear versions of

this story time and time again; no love, no stability 稳定 as a child; a
wound so deep that nothing can heal it. As if all this wasn’t enough,
he also had schizophrenia 精神分裂症. It’s fair to say that when
confronted 理论 with a patient like this, it’s easy for your heart to
sink. Where do you even start? I’d been asked to see him because
the nurses had become concerned about his mood. He couldn’t see
the point of keeping going. Someone with his history, in his
circumstances is at a very high risk of suicide, so I saw him as an
emergency.

He shuffled 拖着脚走 in, hardly making eye contact. We

started talking and I asked him directly if he had been thinking about
killing himself. “I think about it every day,” he said. “Wouldn’t you if
you were me?” I asked him if he had made plans. He shook his head.
“I couldn’t do it to Becky,” he said. I was confused at all
 Becky, it transpired, was not a family member or a girlfriend.
She was just a commuter who, on her way home from work every
day, stopped and spoke him. “She never gives me money, because
she says I’ll use it for drugs,” he explained and added, with almost a
smile, “which I would.” She only stopped for ten minutes or so while
she waited for her train, but would often buy him a coffee or
sandwish and sit with him on the train concourse. “It’s funny,” he
said. “She’s got a good job, but she always sits on the floor next to
me.”

She never failed to stop and it was a fixture 曙光 in his day. It

was a tiny gesture 动作. For her, it was an insignificant event in her
day; a moment of kindness and humanity while she waited for her
train. Yet for him, it signified(represented) something so much more.
I suspect even now she has absolutely no idea of the importance of
what she had done. She had shown a damaged, unloved youngman
who the world had only ever shown harshness and cruelty to that,
actually, there was some kindness in it after all. She had given him a
tiny glimmer of hope that he held on to with all his might. While it
might not make headlines, sometimes it’s the small, simple acts if
kindness that can make all the difference.