You may forget it. They may not.

A part of the ‘On Second Though’ series

By: Ezra Nadav

When I was not yet twelve, I watched my grandfather do something I’ve never forgotten.

We were stopped at a McDonald’s just outside of Waco, Texas, one of those roadside moments that usually blends into the background of a childhood road trip. But on this particular day, my grandfather noticed a homeless man nearby. Perhaps the man even approached us, truthfully, the details have blurred with time. All these years later, the exactness of how he came to be part of our afternoon isn’t really what matters.

What matters is that without fanfare, my grandfather invited him to eat with us.

He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t do it for applause. He simply welcomed this man to our table, as if he were a guest like any other. Even as a child, I understood that this wasn’t something most people did. It stood out, not because it was grand, but because it was rare.

Many years later, I brought it up with him. Now in his nineties, my grandfather didn’t remember it. Not at all. But I did. Because that simple gesture helped shape the person I would become. It became a memory I reached for, when thinking about dignity, decency, and what it means to live our values without needing recognition.

I’ve often hoped that the man who joined us that afternoon also remembers. That, for a brief moment, he was treated not as a problem to be solved or a stranger to be pitied, but simply as a person worthy of presence and warmth. A man who sat at a table that wasn’t his, but was welcomed anyway.

That is the strange and beautiful thing about kindness: it often leaves no trace in the mind of the giver, but lingers long in the heart of the receiver.

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Kindness, Memory, and the Human Condition

There’s a quiet asymmetry in human memory. One person’s fleeting gesture can become another person’s turning point. What you offer without thinking twice may become part of someone else’s internal scaffolding.

But that memory isn’t just about sentimentality. It’s about what we choose to remember, and what our memories reveal about the kind of world we’re building.

Kindness is often spoken of as optional, a bonus virtue, something to offer when we’ve finished all the important things. But the truth is more uncomfortable: in many of our systems and structures, dignity is not a given. Some people have to fight for it. Others never notice it’s theirs by default.

So when kindness shows up, especially across those lines of inequality, it’s not just heartwarming. It’s disruptive. It’s a soft defiance of the social order. It reasserts something quietly radical: that everyone, regardless of circumstance, deserves to be seen.

That’s why I remembered what my grandfather forgot. It wasn’t just the act, it was the rupture. A moment where someone was afforded dignity in a world that so often withholds it.

Even the way we speak about kindness gives something away. We “give” it, as if it’s ours to bestow. But maybe kindness is less like a gift and more like a resonance. Something we emit without realising how deeply it might register in someone else.

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What It Reveals About How We Live and Lead

We talk a lot about legacy in terms of accomplishments, what we build, what we publish, what we leave behind. But some of the most enduring legacies are the ones we don’t know we’ve left at all.

This is just as true in leadership. Whether in families, communities, or workplaces, we’re encouraged to focus on performance and results. But so often, our truest influence is found in what we do when we’re not trying to impress anyone.

A passing word of encouragement. A quiet act of inclusion. A refusal to overlook the overlooked.

Leadership, like kindness, is ultimately about how we hold others in our care, even for a moment. Not to gain status or control, but to honour the dignity that should never have been negotiable in the first place.

Because in the end, how we live, how we lead, and how we love are all wrapped up in what we do when no one’s keeping score.

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A Gentle Question

What kindness might you have given that someone else is still carrying?
What gestures, forgotten by you, are still shaping how someone sees the world?

You may forget it.
They may not.

Shalom Aleichem