A strange thing starts to happen when you hit 30. For the first time, you start to notice the success and status of younger, sometimes much younger, people.

Some of this year’s crop of freshmen NCAA basketball players were born when I was a freshman in high school. And then there’s someone like Tom Brady, with his three — practically four — Super Bowl rings and a Victoria’s Secret model for a girlfriend, all before age 30.

Four years ago, I brushed past Tom Brady in a crowd in the Capitol right after the State of the Union address. And for a moment, even though he’s only an inch taller than I am, I felt like my 15-year-old self who would have stopped him for an autograph.

We’re all susceptible to such fits of starstruck envy. But when someone like Heath Ledger dies, you realize that those who are richer, more famous and better looking than you don’t have carefree lives.

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At this point, Ledger’s death hasn’t been fully explained, but it seems clear he was dealing with serious pain. His attempts to avoid that pain may have made things worse, which makes compassion much more appropriate a response than curiosity or condemnation.

Not long before his death, I saw Ledger in “I’m Not There,” director Todd Haynes’ bizarre, brilliant homage to Bob Dylan.

Ledger’s character is based on Dylan in the mid-1970s, while he was going through the turmoil of divorce that led to the quasi-confessional album “Blood on the Tracks.” Ledger was in just a few disjointed scenes, including a poignant lovemaking scene with Charlotte Gainsbourg. But in that short time Ledger conveyed as authentically as could be done the sense of trying to hold onto something rare and good and real about life even after you know it’s gone. There was something true behind his deep-set eyes and square jaw, and it should prod us to make the most of the time we have.

One way to do that is to help people with no expectation of getting anything in return.

It’s fine to write a check to a charity or to donate a coat you don’t wear anymore, but there’s nothing quite like helping people — or just one person — face to face.

Volunteering as a literacy tutor was one of my new year’s resolutions for 2007, and I’m glad to say it’s one of the few I kept.

For a few months now, I have been tutoring a young man who moved here from a Middle Eastern country about a year ago.

He learned some English in high school but needed a lot of help with pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, the sort of things that come naturally to native speakers.

Both of us were nervous at the start, but we were soon making real progress. It’s the kind of progress that reveals itself not in a statistic or an exam, but in a moments that happen in just the right way.

During one lesson, I noticed that he was having trouble with sentences about the passage of time. The word “since” seemed to be particularly difficult for him.

It took us several minutes to figure out what was getting lost in the translation, but when we did, there might as well have been a lightbulb floating over his head.

Making a new connection with another person using language, the thing that makes us humans unique, is a small moment. But such moments are what a good life is made of.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music, and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.