Can You Measure the Depth of Your Humanity?

I don’t remember her first name, just that her last name was Caál. I also remember that people often spoke it with a kind of reverence, almost like you were naming something that had become part of your own foundation.

She was old when I knew her, remarkably old for someone living in Guatemala in 1999. She was probably close to 80, though I never found out exactly. Her skin was so deeply wrinkled it looked like it had held generations together. This might sound strange, but it was also remarkable that she still had all her teeth. In a place where dental care was almost nonexistent, it was virtually unheard of to still have your teeth at 50, let alone 80.

That’s part of what made her smile so captivating. She smiled easily, as if it came from a place that had seen every kind of ache a person could carry and still chose kindness anyway.

Once a week, she would board a bus at 3:00 in the morning to travel from Cobán to Guatemala City. That journey was long even under ideal conditions, roughly four hours, give or take, but she made it without complaint. She’d arrive not to rest, but to serve. I don’t know how many people relied on her. I just know she never stopped moving, always doing work for people who had no hope of doing it for themselves. At her age.

She’d usually stay for a day or two, and then head back to Cobán, where a different kind of work waited: her family. A huge, fractured one. Torn apart years earlier by things I only vaguely understood. And yet somehow, she remained the link that held them together, the only one everyone trusted, the only one who still showed up for everyone, even when they had long stopped showing up for each other.

I still don’t know how you become that kind of person.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that impact doesn’t have to be loud. I started to believe that if something really mattered, you would see its effects in waves. That to do something meaningful, you had to be seen doing it. The world around me echoed that belief constantly: platforms, metrics, movements, stories of lives changed in measurable, InstaChatBookTok ways.

But she wasn’t measurable.

She didn’t leave behind much documentation. She didn’t start a foundation or publish a memoir or even pose for pictures. Interestingly, she came from a culture that believed taking someone’s picture could steal a piece of their soul. There was no internet in her world, no “going viral” in 1999. She didn’t do things for recognition. She just kept showing up, week after week, family member after family member, bus ride after bus ride.

She never asked, “Is this working?” She asked, “Who needs something?”

That’s the shift I’m noticing in myself now. I still want to make a difference, and I still fight the urge to do it in a way that’s visible. I still want to leave things better than I found them. But I’m no longer trying to prove that the difference can, or even should, be tallied.

There are people I’ll never meet again whose names I’ve forgotten, but whose presence shaped me. And if I’m honest, I’d rather be remembered like that, not as someone impressive, but as someone who mattered when it counted.

The story I used to tell myself was that I had to chase significance. That I had to do big things in big ways to justify the space I took up in the world. But lately I’m starting to wonder if depth has nothing to do with scale, and everything to do with how much of a calming influence your presence can carry when the people around you are falling apart.

I still don’t know how to measure humanity. But I’m learning to recognize it when I see it. It looks less like applause and more like follow-through. Less like legacy and more like showing up for one more person.

And that is enough.