The Ones We Couldn’t Stop For

 

Last night, coming off Alaskan Way toward Ballard, I saw a man on the sidewalk. I don’t know if he was alive or dead. I don’t know if he was sleeping, overdosing, or already gone. What I do know is that traffic was moving way too fast for me to stop, and by the time the thought Should I pull over? fully formed, the moment had already passed.

That’s the part that sticks with me — not just what I saw, but what I couldn’t do.

We talk a lot in spiritual circles about being helpers, healers, lightworkers. About always stopping, always stepping in, always being available when suffering crosses our path. It sounds noble. It looks good on social media. But it’s also a lie — or at least a half-truth that leaves no room for reality. Real life does not slow down so you can be spiritually correct. Roads don’t pause. Traffic doesn’t part. And sometimes the choice to stop isn’t yours to make at all.

What lingers isn’t guilt so much as uncertainty. The not knowing. The unanswered question that follows you home and sits quietly in the room while you kick off your shoes. Was he okay? Did someone else stop? Was help already on the way, or was I the last pair of eyes to see him? There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from unresolved witnessing — no clear outcome, no action taken, no closure. Just a moment suspended in your body.

Here’s something we don’t say out loud enough: being spiritually awake does not grant you immunity from physics, danger, or circumstance. Being a lightworker does not mean you are obligated to risk yourself, others, or reality itself to prove your compassion. You are not an emergency vehicle. You are not omniscient. You are not required to override the world in order to remain spiritually intact.

Sometimes — and this is the hard part — you are only meant to witness.

(This is not the man I saw, but is representative of what transpires here in the metro on a daily basis.)

In older spiritual traditions, the witness was sacred. Not the fixer. Not the savior. The one who saw and remembered. The one who carried the knowledge forward that someone was here. That someone mattered. Bearing witness is still work, even when it feels passive, even when it leaves a mark.

Moments like this don’t ask to be solved. They ask to be held. Light a candle. Say a prayer without a name. Acknowledge the person you crossed paths with, even briefly. Not to absolve yourself, and not to rewrite the moment, but to let your body and spirit know that you did not look away.

This is the part of the spiritual path that doesn’t get romanticized. The part where you are awake enough to see suffering, human enough to feel it, and grounded enough to accept that you cannot always intervene. If that unsettles you, it’s supposed to. That discomfort isn’t failure — it’s contact with reality.

And reality, whether we like it or not, is where real lightwork actually happens.