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One evening, after the Maghrib prayer at the mosque, I turned into the alley leading to my house and saw my elderly neighbor walking ahead of me. He had just left the mosque as well. Normally, I would pass him while saying, “Excuse me, Sir.”

But that evening, I wasn’t in the mood for small talk.

Fortunately, my house was closer, so I wouldn’t have to spend much time walking behind him.

The problem was that my neighbor wasn’t walking as he usually did. He was moving slowly—very slowly. Or so it seemed to me. In fact, I began to suspect that he was deliberately slowing himself down. Every now and then he would stop, or perhaps intentionally stop, to pick something up from the road and toss it aside or throw it into a trash bin.

After a while, I finally understood why he was walking so slowly.

A short distance ahead of him was another neighbor, someone even older than he was, also walking at a slow pace.

I stopped and thought to myself: how could someone so much older than me have exactly the same thought as I did?✦