No obligation

Dr Fahim Chand | Tuesday January 27, 2026 08:18

Their reach stretched bravely, then surrendered, as night reasserted its quiet authority.

Inside, the space was warm and forgiving, though beyond the glass walls winter still ruled, patient and unyielding. Beside me sat my roommate, Dave.

The place had slowly emptied, its earlier inhabitants retreating to their own cocoons of comfort, until only the hush remained. Dave was settled deep into a padded armchair, absorbed in the unforgiving elegance of fixed dental prosthodontics, a subject not known for its hypnotic charm, yet tonight essential enough to keep us alert.

Final exams were looming, and midnight had arrived without ceremony. We were on the sixth floor of Western University’s main library, having stumbled upon what felt like a secret sanctuary. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed an elevated view: dark forest dissolving into a glow of quiet streets. It was the perfect backdrop for focused thought, mental stimulation, undisturbed and pure.

Ironically, while our own medical and dental sciences library stayed open 24 hours for the relentless business of saving lives and building bilateral balanced occlusions, this library closed its doors at midnight.

Even academia, it seemed, had a heart. It gently ushered us home to rest our weary neurons, promising sharper minds in the morning. We gathered our things and headed for Dave’s car. Driving through campus toward the main exit, we passed the bus depot. There, under harsh lights, a lone figure paced in a dark winter coat, knapsack slung tight, eyes darting with quiet urgency.

“Looks like someone missed his bus,” I said. In London, the last bus left at midnight. The clock now read 12:15 a.m. No Uber would materialise.

Cellphones were still rehearsing their future role as saviors.

Dave eased the car alongside him. I rolled down the window and asked if he was okay, if he was waiting for a ride. The panic on his face answered before he did. We told him to get in. The relief that washed over him was almost luminous.

He lived in the opposite direction from us, but Dave drove him home anyway, depositing him safely before turning back toward our own beds. Dave stood six foot two, 220 pounds of muscle, a former star running back for the University of Windsor.

But what defined him had nothing to do with size or strength. It was compassion. We didn’t have to stop. There was no obligation, no reward. Yet Dave altered our route without hesitation for a stranger in the cold.

I’ve often wondered, written even, whether we are born good and learn to be cruel, or born cruel and learn restraint. Most studies, to my relief, suggest we are innately good. And yet the world regularly challenges that comfort, confronting us with acts of staggering inhumanity, some committed under the borrowed authority of religion.

I am no theologian, but I know of no faith whose doctrine begins with the words: kill your fellow man. What I do know is this, on a winter night, long before apps and algorithms, goodness quietly flagged down a stranger and gave him a ride home.

Dave is one among more than eight billion people on this planet, and it makes you wonder how we scale that instinctive goodness to curb our inhumanity.

If we are the only sentient life in the universe if we are indeed God’s masterpiece, are we living up to the billing? The verdict, if we’re honest isn’t flattering. We stumble more than we soar. Still, there is time. Hope, inconveniently persistent, refuses to clock out.

My wife, Shabana, sent me a thought-provoking post. Astronaut Ron Garan, after 178 days aboard the International Space Station, returned to Earth carrying more than data. He came back with a recalibrated understanding of humanity.

From orbit, Earth is a single luminous blue sphere, no borders, no flags, wrapped in a paper-thin blue halo, the atmosphere that keeps everything alive. Astronauts call this the overview effect: a shift that makes division meaningless and responsibility unavoidable.

We are all passengers on the same fragile spacecraft. From space there is no “us versus them.” There is only us. And maybe you don’t need to go to space to see it. Sometimes the overview effect happens in a parking lot at 12:15 a.m., when you choose to stop for a stranger in the cold.