Included were the funds needed to protect dogs and cats in the U.S., and wild animals in the mountains of China. Suddenly, there also appeared pleas for the victims of this disaster and that.

As those subsided, my phone rang, and, sure enough, it was another telemarketer asking me to donate to — well, I actually cannot remember since so many arrive on my phone on a daily basis.

At that point, I gave up on the phone, turned off the television, simply stared out the window into the darkness of the night and began to wonder about our acts of giving.

We spend our lives reaching into our pockets to get rid of the homeless person who accosts us on the street. We give into the relentless telemarketer so, hopefully, they won’t call us again, and we screen all our calls so we can ignore the calls for money. We have become pretty jaded about the real needs that exist within close proximity to ourselves.

Is it that homeless man on the street, or the guy at the door who is collecting for the XYZ cause? No, it is much closer than that. It is all those people you classify as friends and acquaintances who really need you for a variety of reasons.

Have you thought about how a simple kind word to the strange fellow in your economics class might change his whole perspective on the world? Have you considered how inviting an individual sitting alone in The Vista at Shaw, Brody Square, South Pointe or any other cafeteria on campus to eat lunch with you might make a very lonely person survive or make it through another day with a positive attitude? Have you considered just listening to your roommate while he or she pours out his or her trials and tribulations?

We all are in need of people who are there when we need them, but we fail to realize that momentous reasons are not the things we need to focus on.

Family tragedies, massive losses of money and deaths in the family do not exist on a daily basis.

There are too many times when the little things in our lives require the kind words and actions of others. We need people to be there for us, and we equally need to be there for them.

But if we only think about those gigantic times of need, it’s easy to ignore all the seemingly minor events and press the lock on our car doors as the individual approaches with the sign that reads, “Homeless and in need of food!”

I remember an instance a fairly long time ago when I was leaving the engineering building around 11 p.m., and heard sobbing coming from the staircase.

I had a choice: to turn around and go out another exit, move quickly past the individual, or stop and at least ask if there was anything that I could do.

A story unfolded of a fiancé who that night had decided to cancel a wedding date only a week away, marry this young man’s best man and leave the state. The sobbing young man was graduating, and life couldn’t have looked bleaker.

Like the homeless man or the charity telemarketer, wouldn’t it be easy to walk away and say nothing?

But then he confided in me that he had come back to the building to try to get onto the roof to jump.

Think about it. What would you have done? I didn’t have a cell phone. I had no way to reach anyone in authority without leaving him alone and risk him disappearing. So I sat and listened, made comments, listened and listened and listened.

At 3 a.m., we had come to the decision together that it was a bleak and awful night, but things could be worked out if he spent time with people on campus who knew how to guide him through the heartache.

He took a different path from the one he had walked earlier in the evening and succeeded in surviving his turmoil.

Did I do anything? Not really. I just listened. I didn’t perform surgery or cure him of cancer or grant him a fantastic wish. I just listened. And that is what I was meant to do.

There will be a myriad of times when someone you know or don’t know needs you to just be there — whether it is the shoulder you provide, the helping hand or the ear you extend to hear their pleas.

We are not put on this earth simply to deal with the great tragedies we encounter in our lives.

We are here to be there when needed for those seemingly little things that are really not little at all.

Craig Gunn is a guest columnist at The State News and an academic specialist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Reach him at gunn@egr.msu.edu.