I pulled up next to to him on my bike. It was a cold, drizzly afternoon and both of us were wet: him with his headphones, me with my helmet. Oblivious to my presence, he was furiously typing something on his phone, which was getting wetter every passing second. So when the lights turned green, off he went, still on his phone: right into an electric scooterist.

The collision knocked him on his back and his headphones flew onto the other side of the street. The oncoming traffic ran them over in a brutal, coordinated effort: the first car crushed one side, while the second finished off the other. Later, it was impossible to tell what they had been before.

A few of us rushed to his aid. A young Asian man, a middle-aged Indian man, and myself. I instinctively got out my phone to call 000.

Miraculously, he was fine. His backpack had cushioned the fall, such that his head and hands didn’t touch the pavement.

The most striking thing about all this was his reaction. “That was close!” he yelled, watching his headphones get crushed. “I’m lucky that’s not my arm.” For a few seconds, we stood there under the rain, watching the cars drive by and gradually crush his headphones more and more. It was almost meditative: the consistent rhythm of them being run over, like bolts of orchestrated lightning.

After a while, he thanked us, brushed himself off, and ran across the light before it turned red. All this happened in less than 20 seconds.

He could have responded so differently. He could have cursed the reckless scooterist, the loss of his headphones, the incessant rain, the near miss of a serious injury. But he did none of this. Instead, he chose gratitude, laughing in the face of adversity, acknowledging that things could have been far worse. Writing this, his laughter still lingers in my mind, a reminder that silver linings are always present, and that the most chaotic moments can provide the strangest lessons.