It taught her something she tried, after that, to pass along to every class she stood in front of, though she never told them where she had learned it.

We do not get to know, she would say, which of the things we do will be the one that matters to someone.

We rehearse the big moments, the ones with our names on them, and we imagine that those are where our effect on the world will live.

And then it turns out that the thing that reached eleven years into a child’s life and set the course of it was not the landing at all, which the girl had slept through the start of and barely understood, but a single wordless nod given in passing by a woman who did not even remember giving it.

The large deliberate acts are not usually where we touch each other.