I had an appointment in Berlin’s Mitte recently. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot.

Now, the appointment mention is a bit of a red-herring. True, it was for some medical tests, but I’ve reached the age at which that’s nothing surprising. And while I won’t be told about the results for a week, they were only administered to see if my current medications are doing their job. The doctor thinks it might be time to reduce.

The issue on this day had had more to do with the journey.

It’s icy in Berlin these days, weeks. Not crazy cold, nothing like when I was kid in Wisconsin, or Colorado. But officially freezing, day and night.

The streets and sidewalks are Schlitterbahns, ice roads. The ice wouldn’t be my problem on this day, either. Claudia and I navigated them without incident.

Having slipped to the nearest bus, which then slid to the nearest S-Bahn station, we took the train to the center of town, the Friedrichstrasse train station. Now, there are a couple options from the station to our destination. But it was Mitte and we do love walking through Mitte, so we hopped on the escalator to head towards the street.

About halfway up the moving stairs, an elderly gentleman (and I say this carefully, because I am in that class to many others), stumbled backwards toward us, down the stairs. Others on the escalator grabbed his hands. Someone grabbed and secured the roller suitcase he’d been transporting up the stairs.

But the hand grips failed, and the man continued falling, backwards. He was a couple steps in front of us and tipping backwards more and more. The hard metal stairs, the pointy and rather nasty escalator steps, seemed to be his destiny. He was now falling, backwards.

So I dove in, and I grabbed him. I lifted him as much as I could manage, which to be fair was not nearly as much as younger me would have managed. I couldn’t get him back to his feet, but I could keep him from crashing into the stairs. I just held him there, not on his feet, but suspended above some uncomfy stairs.

He was in a bit of a panic, though. It’s easy to see why. He’d been tumbling, out of control, backwards, down the stairs, and now his fall had been arrested by god knows what, from behind.

While I was thinking we’d be fine for the final handful of seconds until we reached the top, he wasn’t sure. So he continued to fight to get onto his feet. In doing so, his planted his feet on the rise between the steps, and shoved backwards, as hard as he could.

This didn’t really help him, at all. But it sent me spiraling down the metal stairs, tumbling head over heels. At the bottom of an up escalator, if you’re falling down it, the steps carry you back up a bit and you continue your roll, in slow motion.

A wonderful young man grabbed my arm and stopped this process. He helped me to my feet. I was unsteady at that point, so I grabbed onto the rubber railing. This of course allowed Berlin commuters to curse me as they used the left side of the stairs to stomp past.

At the top, neither the man nor his partner spared me a second look. With Claudia supporting me, emotionally mostly, I was able to walk off the pain and shock within a couple blocks.

Which is when I starting wondering about what it all meant. I was trying to help. I didn’t, really, not more than a little. I annoyed most of the folks around me. I had some cuts and bruises, and a shattering realization that I am really, really no longer young.

It didn’t seem like much of a reward for trying to do the right thing. But then I started thinking that isn’t really the deal, is it? The good things we do, the nice comments or small kindnesses, don’t necessarily get noticed, aren’t necessarily noticed, and if they are, they are not necessarily appreciated. Not to in any way compare my tumble with actual heroism, but we’ve been reminded of this fact quite shockingly lately in Minneapolis.

Kindness is essential. Kindness is not necessarily rewarded.

“Next time, I think I’ll watch the guy fall down the stairs,” I told Claudia as I was working this out.

“No,” she said. “Next time, you’d probably do the same thing.”

Which, I hope, is true. Because that’s the lesson I’ve pulled out of this episode. We should try to help, whenever we can. But it won’t always work out as it might in our writing.

Still, we should always try. Shouldn’t we?