The collision of the two vehicles startled me. I swerved to the side of the road to ensure that I did not become a victim. My husband jumped out of the car before it had even stopped and rushed towards one of the cars that had been involved in the accident. Instinctively, I rushed towards the other car in an attempt to try and save the victim. From inside it, I heard the voice of a woman, calling faintly for assistance, “someone help me… my back! My hips! I can’t breathe, please help me!” carefully, I pulled at the door. Immediately, it flung open. The woman was trapped between the driver’s seat and the steering wheel. She was trying to pull herself from the entrapment but her attempts were all in vain because she did not move an inch. Slowly, I tagged at the seat and unfastened the seat belt. Luckily, there were no more complications and to our great relief, she was finally free! Pulling her from the smashed car, I carefully stretched her on a blanket offered to me by my husband, from my memory of first aid that I received in senior school, I covered her hastily to prevent the incidence of shock and waited for the arrival of the ambulance. This incident was stamped in my memory and it has never faded in my mind. It could be as a result of how much I received than I got. The assistance I gave this stranger gave me peace, inner satisfaction, and calm. Above all, it gave me one of life’s greatest lessons; giving unconditionally is a virtue that should be put to use because all kind of giving without other intentions helps to elevate human suffering and makes life more bearable.
One of the benefits of being helpful to people is the fact that all manner of kindness has the tendency to spread. This means that it may just start with you helping a couple of people that you don’t even know and probably they will never get the opportunity to know you and soon, the number grows and you realize that a dozen more people have joined in to help, the number continues to increase to up to a hundred and even thousands. These people do not know each other but kindness still has a positive influence on the receivers and just like ripples of water in a lake, there will be a whole sea of people with happy faces across the country who are just gaining happiness from a mere action of help. This just serves to show that helping makes life bearable to both the sufferers and the helping parties (Lowe, par. 20; L’Armand & Pepitone 193)
Good deeds rarely go unrewarded. There are three ways in which helping can be rewarding, one of them being that the probability of one receiving help later on in the future is high when they help other people. Another reward that can be obtained from helping is the fact that the person who is helped is relieved from the personal distress they were going through before they received help and finally, the last reward that can be obtained from helping others is that people can be able to gain approval from the society and thus increasing their self-worth (Burnstein 775).
Another good thing about helping is that help emanates purely from people’s hearts. Pure altruism comes by when someone experiences empathy towards an individual who is in need. This means that pure giving comes in when one is able to put themselves into the shoes of the people who are suffering and personally feel the emotional torment that the person is undergoing. When we are empathetic with someone’s troubling situation then we are willing to go through any options to attempt for purely altruistic reasons and this is done irrespective of what rewards one is likely to acquire through the help accorded (Darley 105)
Works Cited
Burnstein, Eric, Crandall, Earnest, & Kitayama, Evans. “Some Neo-Darwinian decision rules for altruism: Weighing cues for inclusive fitness as a function of the biological importance of the decision.” Journal of Personal Social Psychology74.6 (1994): 773-789.
Darley, Johnson & Batson, Cole. “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27.3 (1973): 100-108.
L’Armand, Katrina, & Pepitone, Arwin. “Helping to reward another person: A cross-cultural analysis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31.7(1975): 189-198.
Lowe, Richard. “Being helpful.” Online mind, 2009. Web.