Occasionally on Facebook I will reach out to someone I haven’t talked to in years. Inevitably I start off by saying, “I apologize if I was ever an asshole to you in the past. I didn’t mean to but it is only recently that I’ve realized that the way I view myself and the ways others view me is not always the same thing.”
This opening may also be why most people don’t reply back. That and the fact that getting in touch via Facebook is so 2008…
Anyway, as I have gotten older I’ve realized just how clueless we are in understanding the role we play in other people’s lives. We all view ourselves as the hero of our own story with the camera constantly focused on us and us alone. Since we are the focus of our own lives it just seems natural that others would view things the same way. I think the first time most people really understand the disconnect is that first unrequited crush where the other person is your everything but to them you are nothing but a passing glance.
Even with that knowledge we still walk around oblivious to the fact that what we do impacts others. I’m only now realizing that things that I said that I felt were jokes that played off my dry and dark sense of humor were just viewed by other people as being mean. (I’ve also realized that many of my jokes aren’t nearly as funny as I thought they were though I still feel that is because I am too cutting edge. I’m just working on a different level, man.) I’m trying to keep in mind that what I say or do can have an impact on someone else even if I have no intention or knowledge of it. We are all the heroes of our own lives while alternating between villains and supporting characters and extras in those around us and we are never quite sure where we are being cast.
Still, it is important to remember the difference you can make in someone’s life through an action that is small.
Ages ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and my Commodore 64 was the epitome of technology, I was part of a teenage Catholic youth retreat in Chicago. One of those events where you put a lot of teens together and tell them that they are our future without giving them any guidance or even an explanation that the future is going to need a lot of work due to the mistakes that everyone else made in the past. Being a teenager who is aware of the future is like the person walking into the house the morning after the party. You can see that everyone had a lot of fun last night but you are going to be the one on their hands and knees scrubbing the vomit off of the tile floor before mom comes home.
Anyway, I will never forget one thing that happened to me at this event. We were all supposed to go around to various people and pray with them. It sounds odd to start and add a bunch of teenagers who don’t know each other and you can just feel the awkwardness rising. Surprisingly, I never seemed to have a problem with this. I did what I was told, completed the exercise, and was waiting for the next step when near the end this girl grabbed me and asked if I would pray with her. I was going to mutter something about how I had already done one of these but decided to be nice and listen. Which is pretty much all I did. I sat there and listened and paid attention.
After everyone was done they went around and asked people to talk about their experiences. We’re talking about a room of several hundred people so it was easy to just fade into the background and disappear. You’re just a face in the crowd. Except once I realized that the girl I just prayed with was coming up to the microphone I suddenly wasn’t. And when she explained how she walked around for minutes, terrified about coming up to some stranger and talking to them and how at the last minute she turned to this one guy who looked nice and was stunned to find that he listened and cared about what she had to say made her completely rethink what people can be.
I was stunned because I had no idea I had this impact.
I don’t remember her name. I don’t think I ever knew her name. What she said was probably the greatest compliment anyone has ever given me in my entire life. What I did may have been the nicest act I’ve ever done and I was oblivious to it. I’ll never forget it though. People never forget how you make them feel.
No comments:
Post a Comment