Both of us are looking to more deeply understand and connect with who we’re standing in front of. Not just any squirrel, but this particular squirrel, his species, his features and mannerisms, the specific arrangement of facts that make him this animal and not the idea of an animal. We are crouched, quiet, watching him work a nut in his hands.

He sits on the crown of the rock with his bottom half gone to stone. Nothing below the waist moves…not a haunch, not a foot. Every spark of energy he is has climbed up into his top half. The nut turns, spinning between a blur of his hands. A fleck of shell drops. Another.

Four hikers come up the trail behind us and stop. They think Paige is taking a photograph and they don’t want to ruin the shot, which is a small kindness, and I appreciate the human-to-human courtesy. I wave them on — go ahead, you’re fine. We’re just watching this little guy. And as they pass, they see what we’ve stopped for. They see that it is, in the end, a squirrel. Just a red squirrel.

I see the thought, perhaps confusion, perhaps judgment on the faces of the first three. But it is the fourth that puts the thoughts of the group to words, spoken aloud as she walks by: It’s a squirrel. There are a million more of them on the trail.

It’s spoken not quite cruelly, but with the particular flatness of someone whose day has, in her opinion, just been ever so slightly inconvenienced for what she considers no good reason.

And they walk on.

I didn’t say anything aloud. But something in me answered. There are a million more of them on the trail. But not this one.

Because yes. There are a million more. But not him.

This one will be dead by spring, most likely, and will never be on any trail again, and the fact that there are a million more does not make him replaceable, any more than the existence of eight billion people makes any individual human unremarkable enough to count.

When she spoke the words, all I could think was that we would never try such a statement the other way. We would never stand over a human being and say, It’s a person. There are billions more where that came from. We recoil at such dismissal, and rightfully so. It’s the logic of the worst things people have ever done to each other. And we say it about the living world without a flicker, a hundred times a day, and call it common sense.

I don’t think that woman is a bad person. I think she has a very ordinary illness, and I have it too, and so do you. We have been trained out of attention. We have been taught that the common is the unremarkable, that abundance of a species cancels its worth, while abundance of material things amplifies our value. We’ve come to love dead things while ignoring life, and believe what we’ve been told that a thing you could see a million times is a thing not worth seeing once.

It is the most efficient possible way to live in a world you intend to use and not love.

If nothing is particular, then we don’t ever have to mourn.

But common and unmiraculous are not the same, and somewhere we started treating them like they were.

And I wanted to ask that woman on the trail that told me she knew of a million others just like the one I was connecting with: do you know even one of them? Have you ever, in your life, stopped long enough to know a single one?

Because this one has a name now. I’ve named him Bruce Hudson, (yes, he gets a first and last name. The last being a shared one with his family and the first because he is an individual). I know his coloring now: the gray of him, the white chest, the black-edged tail. I know he is still and racing at once, and that the two never war in him the way they war in us. I know that he holds a nut in his left and works it with his right, so precisely and so fast, each hand at a different job, that I found myself wondering, for the first time in my life, whether a squirrel can be left-handed. I have no idea. But it is the kind of question you only get to ask about a someone. You don't wonder whether an idea is left-handed. And after a few moments of watching his relationship with the world around him as he worked the nut in his hands, I saw him scurry away into the shelter of the trees, which are alive and worth naming, too.

Bruce did not become worth watching because I chose to stop mid-stride or because Paige pulled out her app to find his particular species. He was always this specific, always this improbable, always a someone. He was always.

It was our own schemas (the way we see the world) that determined whether or not to register that. The woman’s schema said just a squirrel, whereas ours, Paige’s and mine, cracked open that self-focused worldly schema that has been handed to us by society, and decided instead to peek inside to see what else could be. That choice, to see and to connect, is what allowed us to see that the thing that keeps us human is the act of living in the plain astonishment that all of this life is here at all and that it is worth noticing even at the smallest level. Maybe especially at the smallest level.

You cannot love a million of anything. Love doesn’t work at that scale; it never has. But you can love one. You can know one. And it turns out that knowing one is the whole thing. I believe that it will be the person who has knelt on a cold trail and actually seen one squirrel who will be closer to saving the world than the person who has walked past a million.

There are a million more on the trail.

Yeah.

But not this one.

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It turns out the world had something else in mind.

I have been adopted, over the past two and a half weeks, by people from Hungary and Zimbabwe, Australia and Botswana, Zambia and Namibia, Wales and Fiji, Kazakhstan and South Africa, England and Scotland and Northern Ireland.

They toured with me. They shared their taxis with me. They danced with me. They walked me across borders. They pulled out a chair at their dinner tables and gestured for me to sit. They did this without knowing me. They did this without being asked. They did this as though I were already someone they were responsible for, and they were simply finding me again after a long time away.

I want to write about that, and how it matters for so many of you, too. Some of you reading this are the steady one. The capable one. The one who shows up. The shelter director, the lead vet, the rehab specialist, the field researcher, the rescuer who keeps her phone on at night. You are the friend everyone calls when something falls apart. The eldest daughter. The therapist (officially trained or not). The single parent. The one who has been the person others lean on for so long that you have forgotten there was ever supposed to be someone for you.

What I experienced in Zimbabwe is something I want you to understand to know what the world is still capable of giving people like you and I.

I lost my mother when I was five. I lost my father, after fifteen years of walking through illness with him, just over a decade ago. I have been without parents, in the literal sense, for most of my life.

I understand what it means to have to become self-reliant. And I also know the unintended consequences that capability can have on relationships, because when you become someone who is capable of taking care of yourself, you stop being someone other people offer to take care of. The mentor doesn’t appear, because you do not look like you need one. The guide doesn’t show up, because you seem to know the way. The hand on the back of your head, the arm around your shoulder, the voice that says I’ve got you — those things stop being offered, because no one looking at you can see that they would land. Capability is read as completeness. The world responds to what it sees, and what it sees is someone who is fine.

I have spent most of my adult life being fine. I have been good at it. I have built a career on being the steady one in rooms where other people were falling apart.

Before I left for Zimbabwe, I had been working — privately, slowly — to break what I think of as generational silences.

The places in my line where there are no people to call, no parents to send pictures to, no living elder who knew me as a child. I have been trying to claim, in their absence, a different kind of belonging. An ancestry of the earth. A kinship to the places and the creatures I have given my life to. I do not know how to explain this in a way that does not sound mystical, and I am not interested in defending it. I will only say that I came here believing that some part of the world might, if I let it, be willing to hold me.

I did not expect to be held by people.

A woman from Namibia made room for me at her table. A group from Australia waved me into their taxi without my asking. A pair from Zambia walked me across a border. A woman from Botswana danced with me. A group from Hungary and a couple from Zimbabwe took me on as a touring companion as if it had always been the plan. A family from Wales pulled me into their dinner. None of them owed me anything. None of them had been told to look out for me. They simply did.

And I, the capable one, the self-reliant one, the woman with no parents and the long practice of being fine, found myself, more than once, on the verge of tears and deeply entrenched in the ignited feeling of joy and connection.

Being on the receiving end of that, at forty-three, is a strange kind of becoming.

Yet, what happened to me is not really about me. I am writing this for you. I think there is an entire population of people in caring professions and quiet roles whose competence has been read by the world as a sign that they do not need anything. I think a lot of you carry what I have begun to call the cost of being capable, the one in which no one appears for you because they don’t think you need it. And a lot of you have stopped expecting anyone to notice.

If that is you, I want to tell you, because I think no one has told you yet: you can be folded into other people's tables.

Eleven countries’ worth of strangers, over two and a half weeks, folded me into theirs, and undid the cost of being capable in me without even meaning to.

I have never, in my life, had someone stroke my hair. I’ve rarely been someone for whom others show up unbidden when I’m struggling. I’ve not really had someone hold me when I was uncertain or scared, in the way a parent holds a child who does not yet know the world is going to be all right. Those things have, for the most part, not been part of my life. I made my peace with that years ago, or thought I had, by becoming someone who did not need them.

What I learned in Zimbabwe is that I did need them. I just didn’t know what they felt like until I danced and toured and taxiied and ate at others’ tables .

The strangers who adopted me on this trip did not stroke my hair. But they did the grown-up version of it. They noticed me. They made sure I had what I needed. They invited me into things I would have stood at the edge of. They held space for me, the way I have spent my professional life holding space for other people, and they did it without my having to earn it or perform anything in exchange.

If you are reading this and you recognize yourself — if you feel that tightness in your chest, the way our body does when something true has been said too close — I want you to know two things.

The first is that the cost of being capable is real. You have not been imagining it. What you may have gotten wrong though, is how you have tried to make sense of why nobody shows up for you. It’s not because you are unlovable or unseen or unworthy. The world has simply not known how to give back to you, because the world has been reading your strength as a sign that you do not require any. The misreading is the problem. Not you.

The second is harder for me to write, because most of us in this work spend our days seeing the worst of what humans do. We have endless catalogs of the cruelty, and we hold countless stories of the animals that have been failed. It is easy, in this work, to lose the ability to believe in the goodness of strangers. I have lost it more than once. The first time it was the animals that brought me back to believing in the good in the world.

My experiences in Zimbabwe have reminded me though, that people can bring us back, too: people from eleven countries, none of whom owed me anything, decided that I was theirs to look after. They did not have to. There was no system requiring it, no relationship demanding it, no payment for it. They simply chose to. Over and over. For two and a half weeks.

I cannot prove to you that the world is good. I am not even sure that is the right word for what I am trying to describe. But I can tell you what happened to me, and I can tell you that it was not an exception. It was not a fluke. It happened repeatedly, with strangers who had nothing in common with each other, on different countries’ soil, across more than two weeks. The pattern is the testimony.

People are still doing this. They are still folding solo travelers into their tables, still dancing with the woman who came alone, still walking strangers across borders. They are doing it everywhere. They are doing it now.

If you have lost your ability to believe this, I understand. I am writing this in part to give it back to you, the way it was given back to me. I’m giving you this as a testimony, as a record of something that actually happened. Strangers showed up. They keep showing up. The work we do in animal care and conservation and advocacy is the work of people who have been wounded by the worst of what humans do. We forget, because we are just trying to keep going, that we are also part of a species that does this: That dances with the lonely woman. That makes the chair at the table. That walks the stranger across the border without being asked.

We are part of that, too. Not only the harm. Also this.

I leave Zimbabwe tomorrow. The woman who got on the plane two and a half weeks ago was prepared to be alone, and good at it, and proud of how good at it she was. The woman getting on the plane home has been, for the first time in a long time, looked after. I am not the same. I do not know yet what to do with that. But I want to name it before I leave, because I think there are some of you who need to hear it and believe this is possible, before you carry one more day of being the steady one without anyone steady for you.

As I prepare to board a plane tomorrow to leave this place, I say thank you. To Hungary, to Australia, to Zambia, to Botswana, to Namibia, to Wales, to Fiji, to Kazakhstan, to South Africa, to Zimbabwe, to England and Scotland and Northern Ireland. To every person who put a chair next to theirs and waved me into it. You did not just adopt a solo traveler. You adopted a girl who has been without parents or people for a long time, and you did not need to know that to do it.

Maybe I just got lucky.

Or maybe the world and the people in it are still just that good.

I have a challenge for you this week. But first, a story.

Before I left for this trip, the one I’m on right now, in Zimbabwe, I sat down and wrote about the younger version of me who walked into a shelter for the first time and washed dishes for months before she was trusted to walk a dog.

I thanked her for not quitting. For showing up on shifts …

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