Cavalry

Imagine you had a choice between pressing two buttons. If you press Button A, then nothing happens. If you press Button B, then one hundred random good things of varying magnitude happen to one hundred different random people, none of whom are you. Which button do you press?

I don’t mean to come off too strongly here, but I think if you push Button A then you’re kind of a jerk. Pressing Button B makes you pretty awesome.

Okay, now let me throw a little harsh reality your way: no one is coming to save you. In your time of need, you will be on your own. The problems in your life will be solved by you or they will be unsolved. You have to tackle it all alone. There is no cavalry.

Except… there’s you. You’re the cavalry. Just because no one is coming to save you, doesn’t mean you can’t go out and save others.

Many people hit this point of realization and get bitter. They say, “well, if no one else is going to save me, why should I save anyone else?”

Remember that thing about the buttons? No one is coming to save you, that’s a given. But you have an active choice between a world where nothing good happens to anyone, or where something good happens to a lot of other people. Being the cavalry is good.

And sure, actually being someone else’s cavalry takes more effort than pushing a button. But so does everything. There’s no easy road – everything in life is hard. But you can take a hard road that doesn’t save anyone or a hard road that saves a bunch of people.

And maybe the next time someone says, “I won’t bother to save anyone else, because no one ever saved me,” they’ll have to catch themselves. They’ll have to reconsider, because there was that one time… that one time that you saved them. And in so doing, you took away their last excuse to push Button A. Maybe they’ll go save someone else themselves, then. Let the cavalry cascade start with you.