Last week I had an incredible adventure, marked with a few moments of—well, “terror” is probably too strong a word. But it’s fair to say that I was well out of my comfort zone and nose-to-nose with my own mortality.

In the process I learned something vital about my efforts to help others.

Sometimes being right is exactly the wrong thing.

Since my dad’s death in November, I’ve kept in close touch with my mother. My parents were married for 64 years, and one of the most significant things I can do for Mom is to give her steady emotional support.

A few evenings ago I failed in that respect.

I’ve been thinking lately about stereotypes, and how it’s so easy to fall into using them, even when I try to stay on moral high ground. As a writer, it could even be said that I depend on them. If, say, I were to write, “The thin black man put a hand to his cheek and drew his fingers through a patchy beard. His nails were long and covered with what looked like motor oil,” I’m willing to bet you could envision the person. He would not be dressed in a suit.

The trick is to avoid snap judgments and prejudices based on appearance, class or race.

This is the story of how some unintended consequences helped a struggling charity grab hold and grow.

Mathius Craig had an idea, a good idea. A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had enrolled in a course called Engineering for Social Solutions. Students were asked to design a project that would help an impoverished community solve a pressing problem. Craig’s idea was to install wind turbines that would bring electricity to the most remote villages of Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. He knew the region fairly well; he’d spent time there with his brother and his mother, who studied Amerindian languages

One spring several years ago, our wonderful adult Sunday school class read Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth.  I was intrigued by what it had to say about our inner character. Recently I’ve been thinking about how the lessons in the book apply to helping others. They reinforce two points I’ve come to believe with all my heart: As much as anything, service is a spiritual practice. And the journey—the approach you take when you help others—is every bit as important as the destination.

In my favorite chapter, Tolle writes about the social roles we take on and how tightly they constrict us, if we let them. Like it or not, our social standing largely determines how we move through the world, and how others orbit around us. “The way in which you speak to the chairman of the company might be different in subtle ways from how you speak to the janitor,” he writes. True, and I’m ashamed to admit it. Watch carefully, he writes, and you will detect this kind of performance first in others and then in yourself. Often it’s a formidable barrier to loving kindness.

But how do you not play a role? As soon as you try to be “just yourself,” Tolle notes, your mind creates a role for you, perhaps something like “wise one.”