“Equal measures of sadness and joy” –
I hear echoing the mother in Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Some of the saddest words ever spoken on the stage — coming perhaps from the opposite viewpoint of your mother, but ending somehow in the same place.
As you say — when your heart is truly moved to an act of kindness, then you do it, and don’t weigh the consequences. They aren’t yours to weigh, anyway. You can only control what you do, not all of its ramifications.
One more quote, from one of my favorites, the Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot:
” … do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.”
(The whole passage in the third Quartet, The Dry Salvages, from which this comes, while somewhat gnarly, repays effort.Forgive an old English major for over-literariness.)