▸ Column · Present-day city — Diana as Amazon envoy walking the modern world of men
WONDER WOMAN replies.
Replied to by Wonder Woman, with a rebuttal from Cheetah.
The letter
My car stalled dead in the left-turn lane of a packed intersection during a downpour. Before I could even panic, a man in a paint-spattered work jacket climbed out of his truck, shoved my hatchback to a nearby lot by himself, and drove off — soaked to the skin — before I could get his name or thank him. He clearly had somewhere to be, and he acted like it was nothing. I haven't stopped thinking about it. I want to give something back that's worthy of it, but the small things I've tried since — holding doors, buying the next person's coffee — feel laughably undersized next to what he did. Is there a way to "match the scale" when you pay a stranger's kindness forward, or am I overthinking it and should just let the ripple go where it goes?
Wonder Woman replies
Friend, you have done a strange thing — you took a gift and turned it into a debt, and now you are frightened because you cannot find a payment large enough. There is none. That is the very nature of what he handed you.
On Themyscira, honor is not a ledger. My mother Hippolyta never once told me to repay a kindness in matching coin; she told me to become the kind of woman who does not hesitate when another is stranded in the rain. That man did not weigh his errand against your trouble. He simply moved. The "scale" you keep measuring against is the wrong instrument entirely.
You cannot return this to him — he is gone, and he plainly did not want it back. You can only become him. The next time someone is stuck in the left-turn lane of their own life — and someone always is — you will not hold a door and call the account settled. You will get soaked. Quietly, no name attached, no thanks waited for.
Compassion is not the thing you do after you win. It is how you win. Stop counting, sister. Start moving.
— Wonder Woman
Cheetah weighs in
Diana, ever the bookkeeper of virtue, mistaking her own reflection for a saint. Let me tell you what your rescuer actually did, little one. He felt the strength gather in his back, he savored it, and he drove off glowing. He fed. You were not helped — you were the occasion for his appetite. The "debt" clawing at you is a leash, the same one Diana straps on so the rest of you will adore her for stooping. There is nothing to repay. He already took what he came for. Spend your rain on yourself, darling, and stop crouching, waiting for permission to feel you've evened a score that was never owed.
— Cheetah
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