You Lost Something
We were walking the other morning when a woman appeared ahead of us. She must have been in her twenties, with a small child by her side, maybe two years old, still in pajamas around lunchtime. She handed him a lollipop, which already seemed questionable at that age, but what caught my eye was what came next. She let the wrapper fall, just like that, onto the street. No hesitation, no second thought.
As we passed, I didn’t accuse her, I didn’t scold. I simply said: “You lost something.” She turned with a surprised look, as if the thought had never occurred to her, and then, almost sheepishly, kicked the wrapper aside.
That tiny moment stayed with me. Not because of the litter itself — one small piece of trash hardly matters — but because it revealed something larger. We are walking through a society that has become anonymous. People believe they can do what they want, unseen, unaccountable, as if the street, the park, the air belong to no one. We close our eyes, and in that blindness we give ourselves permission to forget that we are always in the presence of others.
The truth is that we are not strangers. Even in the city, even on an ordinary street, we are a community. And sometimes it takes nothing more than a small nudge, a quiet word, to remind someone of that. The wrapper was picked up. The gesture was understood. It was not about the litter, it was about belonging.
We have lost that sense of gentle correction, the courage to remind each other that our lives are shared. Not with anger, not with shame, but with the kind of words that open someone’s eyes without closing their heart. Perhaps the real loss in our time is not the wrapper on the street, but the willingness to say: “You lost something.”