What is the smallest thing a person ever did for you that impacted your life?
別人為你做過什么最小的事卻影響了你的生活？

?

獲得17.5k好評的回答@Gail S Clark：

He gave me a chunk of glass.
他給我一塊玻璃。

My husband was killed on 9/11; he worked in 1 WTC, well above the impact floors. On his birthday in March, 2002, I went to the site that used to be the WTC. It wasn’t cleaned up yet, in fact it was ugly as hell and smelled about the same, and access was still pretty chaotic. I got to the Century 21 department store across the street, and stood against the wall - and just crumbled. Broke down.
我丈夫死于911事件，他在世貿中心一號樓工作，就在被撞擊樓層上面。2002年3月他生日時，我去了世貿中心舊址，那里還沒有被清理干凈，看起來聞起來就像地獄一般，通往那兒的道路也一片混亂，我去了馬路對面的21世紀百貨商店，靠墻站著，心都要碎了，我要崩潰了。

A guy who was working across the street at the site - which was still a full-on disaster area - saw me and came across. “Who did you lose?” he asked. “My husband,” I said, through ugly tears, and I told the guy what firm my husband had worked for, and that it was his birthday.
馬路對面當時完全就是災難現場，一個工作人員看見我了就走過來問我：“你失去什么親人了？”我說：“我丈夫”，我哭得很難看，跟他說我丈夫之前在哪個公司工作，那天是他的生日。

Guy turned out to be a firefighter. Reached into his front pocket. “This is actually really rare. Not a lot of glass survived; it just vaporized.” And he pressed it into my hand.
那個人是消防員，他把手伸進衣服前面口袋里，把一塊玻璃放進我手里說：“這塊真的很少見，大部分玻璃都沒了，熔化掉了?！?/div>

I still have it. It’s not that the guy was giving up a valuable souvenir. It was that he was acknowledging my connection to that little piece of glass, and putting it where he thought it belonged - that, and he needed to give me something that in some small way I could hold onto and focus on, instead of the hurt. This was how he could do that in that one moment.
我現在仍然留著它，不是因為那個男人放棄了一個有價值的紀念品，而是因為他明白我和這一小塊玻璃之間的聯系，把它放到一個他認為這塊玻璃該去的地方。他需要把這個東西給我，讓我能握在手里或多或少把注意力轉移到這上面，而不是整日悲傷。這就是當時他所能做的。

I was so bound up in my own head I never even asked his name; he didn’t ask mine either. If he’s out there now, I want to tell him that the little piece of glass made me start to think that maybe everything wasn’t transient, ephemeral - that maybe there were things, little things, short moments, small pieces, that last no matter what.
我當時思想都集中在這個東西上，甚至都沒問他的名字，他也沒問我的名字。如果他現在還在那兒，我想告訴他這一小塊玻璃使我開始思考，可能不是所有東西都是轉瞬即逝的，可能還有一些東西雖小雖短暫，但不管在什么情況下都能延續(xù)下去。

I want to say to him: thanks for that.
我想對他說：謝謝他的贈品。

?

（翻譯：菲菲）