This lady takes the leftover burritos from her restaurant and lays them out nicely for hungry people each night. And it’s not just the food that matters; the presentation is perhaps more important.

Homeless and hungry people often crave basic human kindness as much as they do food. Regardless that they have deep personal problems, most of them need to feel like the rest of the world sees them as a person, not as an object inside the “homeless” category.

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So, next time the situation is fitting (which won’t be always – some of the homeless population is disturbed and even dangerous), show someone in trouble that you see them as a person, and not a thing.

Responsibility is a cornerstone of civilization. If reliability is not built into the people we interact with, life becomes an irritating and boring slog, as we forever try to verify that things aren’t going wrong.

And so, acts of responsibility and reliability, like the one illustrated here, are far, far more essential than people may realize. Without trustworthy individuals there can be no civilization.

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Before returning to the mundane, make a list of responsible people you know: people who act responsibly for internal reasons. Then resolve to laud their virtues. (But without using their names, so that envy can’t attach.) People need to see that responsibility exists and is praised.

Along with helping others, there is also virtue in helping ourselves. In fact, it’s necessary. If we don’t amuse ourselves and indulge in small joys, we easily become dour and rigid. Along with fierce dedication and hard work, simple and innocent fun is necessary to balance us.

These trash collectors found precisely that kind of fun as they passed a playground and realized that they had some extra time on their hands. And so they parked the truck and hopped onto the playground’s swings.

“To every thing,” wrote Ecclesiastes, “there is a season,” and that includes reversions to childhood pleasures.

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Now, before you move back to the mundane, please take a moment to savor whatever childhood pleasures you’d enjoy revisiting. And then find a way to get back to them. You may be a long way from childhood, and you may not want to spend a great deal of time on your childhood amusements, but revisiting them may do you a lot of good.

In 1998 the gentleman in these photos saved the young woman from a fire. In 2016, she invited him to her college graduation. Good deeds and crisis events tie people together over time, and in this case, benevolently and warmly. There’s something deeply healthy about that.

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So, before going back to the mundane, please think of a few people you’ve been tied together with in some way: people who you have a connection to, even though you may not have seen them for a long time. See where your thoughts take you.

In past times it was common for people to find a comfortable position and just look at the stars for hours at a time. We’ve lost that practice in modern times, but we do at least have powerful telescopes. This photo, of a small section of the sky, shows galaxies upon galaxies. The scope of it is difficult to grasp, and so we won’t bother with numbers.

Our universe is enormous; it is filled with stars planets, and certainly with life. Our world and our galaxy are very average… and we have no idea what is out there, in all those other galaxies. (More or less every dot on that image is a galaxy, not just a star.)

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So, before going back to the mundane, turn down the lights and spend time with this image. The things people are so worked up about – hating and killing over – are less than trivial: dark specs in an eternal ocean. What’s inside of us, on the other hand, is an innate ability to willfully reverse entropy in this universe. Please spend some time trying to grasp this.

It was oppressively hot on this day, 103 degrees. And so, when these two girls heard a garbage truck headed their way, they considered the men working on it, rushed to their refrigerator, grabbed some Gatorade, and ran it out to them.

In this small act of kindness we see the central mechanism of morality in full flower: Considering the situation of another, imagining how you’d feel in that situation, then treating them as you’d like to be treated. It’s the Golden Rule and “Love your neighbor as yourself” rolled into one moment.

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Now, before you go back to the mundane, please think about how the trash collector felt about this event, and how the girls felt about it… think about the euphoric birthing of goodness into the world.

Churches have been ridiculed and insulted for centuries now. If fact, finding faults with Christianity has become a tool for career advancement in many circles. Because of that, we must notice the good churches do. And this image shows a local church getting it right.

Please read through the sign’s text and appreciate it. A billion people living like this (and there are more than two billion Christians on this planet) would make life massively better than it has been.

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So, regardless of how religious you may be, notice people trying to be good and do good; appreciate them and let them know you appreciate them. Encourage and assist as you can. That is how the world improves, and not by sniping at one another.

This is Hideaki Akaiwa. When the tsunami of March 2011 hit Japan, he was at work. Once he determined that his wife of 20 years remained trapped in their home, he found a wetsuit and hurried toward her. But in order to do that, he had to defy authorities and experts, who demanded that everyone wait for the army to show up.

Hideaki had to take enormous risks (it was night at this time), but he found his wife, trapped in their home and with very little air remaining. He pulled her to safety. A few days later, when he verified that his mother was still missing, he did the same thing and saved her as well.

One lesson to draw from this is that authority always demands what is best for authority, not what is best for you and your family. But more importantly, we see that heroism is available to all humans, not to some particular type. This man was a 43 year-old doctor.

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Before returning to the mundane, consider that everyone you pass today has within them the capacity to be a hero. Humans are just that way. Yes, some of us have impediments, almost every person you’ll see has it in them somewhere. See if you can help someone recognize that part of themselves.

These four young men – Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and David Richmond – sat down at a lunch counter which was forbidden to them solely because of their skin tone. The four men sat peacefully, but refused to move. And they remained at the counter, regardless that none of the “student leaders” at their university showed up as promised.

These young men persisted, and others slowly joined them. Eventually the business relented and treated them like everyone else.

There comes a time when honest men and women must take a stand, if they are to live with self-respect. And these men, even though quite young, did precisely that, at considerable risk. As it turned out, they helped change one corner of the world, but more importantly they changed themselves.

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Now, before going back to the mundane, please think about situations in which you might do something like this. But don’t look at the heroic aspect of it. Rather, consider the risks involved, and the very serious possibility of failure. What matters about such actions is not their success, but that we do what we believe is right… that we value ourselves above the demands of the collective.

This image is of a 12 year-old girl, during the Flint, Michigan water crisis of 2014. What she’s doing is inventing a a cheap, easy to build and use lead detector, to help the people of Flint.

Even though she was living a thousand miles away, in Denver, Colorado, she harnessed her unusual abilities and used them to great effect.

Undeserved suffering calls decent people to do something about it… even the young and inexperienced. What older people need to do is to help them find and use such opportunities.

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Now, before you move back to the mundane, consider how you might help a young person to discover and use their talents. This is not always an easy chore, and your odds of success in any particular attempt are probably less than fifty percent. But as they say in baseball, “Unless you swing the bat, it’s absolutely certain that you won’t hit the ball.” So, please think about this, and find ways to encourage the talents of the young.