Accompanying and caring are unspectacular acts. They rarely make headlines and often cannot even be seen. Perhaps that is exactly why they are worth remembering.
To accompany is not to take over another person's experience or rush to solve it. Sometimes it simply means being there, listening, and leaving space. To care is not to take possession of the other either. It is paying attention to a need and responding without turning the gesture into a performance.
We live, however, in a culture where almost anything can end up turned into a presentation of ourselves. Even care can be made visible as identity: let it be seen that we help, let it be known that we are committed, let the gesture say something about who we are.
There is nothing wrong with making a good deed visible when that helps to spread it. The problem appears when visibility starts to matter more than the thing we meant to care for.
Care also reaches the place we inhabit. We depend on other people, on institutions, on communities and on natural systems we did not create. Caring for them is not an activity added on to life; it is part of living inside something we share.
We will not always be able to care greatly. Sometimes it will be a phone call, a visit, a task no one wants to do, picking up something we did not drop, or staying beside someone without finding a brilliant phrase.
They are small gestures, but not for that reason irrelevant. A community is held together, in part, by that kind of repeated action, almost always away from the spotlight.
Perhaps practising the common good has a good deal of this in it: being there, attending, and caring even when no one is watching.