A seemingly small gesture (姿势) at a restaurant outside Houston that wasn’t part of the job description for a Waffle House waitress has now had a big effect on her life.

It happened last weekend, when 18-year-old Evoni Williams was serving an elderly man breakfast. He needed help. So Williams leaned over the table with a fork and a knife and cut up his ham for him. It might have ended there, but a customer named Laura Wolf was struck enough to take a picture and post it online.

“I didn’t know the photo was taken until a couple of hours later,” Williams told the Houston Chronicle. “When I saw it, it’s just something I would do for anybody. I was so busy in here, and I actually took the time to stop and hear what he had to say instead of walking past him.”

It clearly meant something to others too. As of Sunday, more than 130, 000 people had reacted to the post and nearly 7, 000 have shared it. But the story has extended beyond the Internet. Williams, a recent Texas City High School graduate, was honored at a ceremony, Thursday, with a $16, 000 scholarship to Texas Southern University. Williams has reportedly been working full-time at the Waffle House to earn money toward school. Texas Southern University has assigned a counselor (顾问) to help her begin her degree and she is planning to study business management.

Media (媒体) at the local, national and international level have all picked up on the story. It is a moment among several in recent years, captured in a picture, put online, and capturing the attention of the Internet: like a New York City police officer giving a homeless man a pair of boots, or a restaurant goer whose wife died of cancer anonymously (匿名地) paying for the meal of another cancer patient.

In 2016, I suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder(SAD) a form of depression(抑郁症) that is found to make people feel low in the UK between September and April. During that cold and wet period, I got comfort in books.

Books have been used by many to reduce depression. I lose myself into them as thirstily as usually get my morning coffee. Each Christmas, I have a habit of returning to the old favorite books that make up for my emptiness, such as Jane Eyre. Sometimes, to escape from the cold, I run back to the heat that I am used to, so I will read a lot of books set in Africa.

It became important for me to find a way to escape my sadness in the world of books. And isn’t that what art and literature is for? According to JJ Bola, the author of No Place to Call Home, “The world can get you so down that you think you’re the only person going through what you’re going through. But then you read and you realize that you are not alone that if someone else has gone through it and survived, then maybe you can, too.” It is this survival that the reader looks for, that is, the understanding that the winter is not so long after all.

On the night of September 19, 1961, Betty Hill and her husband Barney were driving home through the White Mountains from Niagara Falls. They were travelling on a nearly deserted two-lane highway when Betty noticed a steady light in the sky that was getting bigger and brighter.

She thought it was a planet or a star. Barney, stimulated at her excitement, said it was probably just a wandering aeroplane. Whatever it was, it appeared to be following them.

They stopped their car for a closer look. What they said happened next, changed their lives. The flying object was noiseless. It appeared to be spinning. It was as big as a jet but shaped like a pancake.

So formed the tale of Betty Hill, a New Hampshire social worker who, with Barney, a postal worker, claimed to be kidnapped by aliens, who were from outer space, on a moonlit night about 60 years ago.

After reluctantly going public with her experience, Hill, who died of cancer at her New Hampshire home, aged 85, became a celebrity on the UFO circuit and was known as the “first lady of UFOs”.

Intriguingly, at the time of the incident, the Hills remembered nothing except that they had spied a strange object in the sky. Later, troubled by nightmares and other stress-related pains, the couple underwent hypnosis(催眠) where the full story came out with the aid of Boston psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, an expert in medical hypnosis.

On their night of contact the Hills arrived home at 5 a.m., unable to account for two lost hours. They were also confused by the odd marks on their telescopes, deep signs on the tops of Barney’s best shoes, Betty’s torn dress and strange circular markings on their car that made the needle of a compass jump wildly.

After seeing them for six months, the psychiatrist concluded the Hills’ lost memory about the hours they lost on that night in 1961 “appeared to involve an amazing experience on the part of both of the Hills”. Whether the experience had been fantasy or reality, Simon could not say, but he said he was convinced they had not been lying. He guessed that it had been a kind of shared dream.

Reports of aliens capturing humans and taking them aboard oddly shaped spacecraft were “comparatively rare” before 1975. After a movie, “The UFO Incident”, about the Hills came out, however, such stories increased.