When Someone Falls

It was an extraordinary moment and one I remain deeply humbled by, although, if I am truthful, I have never quite known how to sit comfortably within it.

During the ceremony, Her Excellency Professor the Honourable Margaret Gardner AC spoke of Australian runner John Landy and a moment from 1956 that would come to define him.

The story took us back to the Australian Mile Championships, where fellow runner Ron Clarke fell. Landy, running immediately behind him, leapt over Clarke, accidentally clipping him in the process. Then, while others raced on, Landy stopped, turned around and went back to help him to his feet.

Remarkably, Landy then resumed the race.

And won.

Yet history remembers something greater than his victory.

It remembers not that he ran, but that he stopped.

What moved me most was not that thousands witnessed his act, nor that decades later a statue would immortalise it. It was that Landy could not have known any of that when he turned around. And that is the part that sends tingles through me.

And somewhere within those words, I began to understand my own discomfort with receiving this honour. In my long-gone equestrian days, achievement was something I consciously pursued. I trained to become better and I entered competitions hoping to succeed.

But my journey with animals came from somewhere else entirely.

I never set out to build a sanctuary or receive an award. I simply met animals who needed something and found that my conscience could not walk past.

One pig quickly became another animal in need, then another and another. And from one act of kindness grew a life of service and somewhere along the way, without ever really noticing it happen, my purpose found me.

Perhaps that is why work grounded in purpose so rarely feels like work, let alone achievement. There are hard days, exhausting days and days when sorrow sits heavier than hope, but beneath them remains the quiet certainty that this is where I am meant to be.

And perhaps there is a little John Landy in all of us.

Not the extraordinary athlete.

But the human being who saw someone fall and instinctively turned back. Though statues may immortalise such moments and medals may recognise a life of service, neither should ever be the reason we do good.

Perhaps it is in these unplanned moments that we find one of the truest tests of our humanity. When someone or something falls across our path, what will our first response be?

For this is so often where a life reveals itself: in those unnoticed moments when conscience asks something of us. An animal needing help, a stranger needing kindness, a piece of our natural world asking for protection or someone struggling beneath a weight we might help them carry.

Perhaps, then, a life of service takes shape without us ever realising it.

It is something that simply grows from enough moments when we could have kept going…

but chose to turn back.