Within Every Person Lies a Story

Consider this: You're driving home after a long day of work, just incredibly excited to climb into bed and not interact with anyone. Of course, you're off at five, just like everyone else, so getting home proves to be a major pain in the ass (especially if you live in the Bay Area). Despite your predicament, you finally make it to the freeway. You're excited to finally pick up the pace a bit, except you just get stuck behind a caravan going ten miles under the limit. You're frustrated and have places to go so you decide to honk your horn to inspire movement.

The van doesn't move, but finally a space in the adjacent lane is vacant so you swerve around. However, just as you're passing you look through the window, you hear a child crying.

Take it back a few moments- if you knew that the driver was a dad and in the back seat was his little girl, delicately asleep after a traumatizing visit to the doctor; if you knew that he was trying to give as much protection and consideration to her as possible, would you have tried to be a bit more patient and understanding?

I'm sure most of your opinions shifted at least a little bit. Even if you aren't a fan of kids, try and remember when you were young and getting shots at the doctor was like the scariest thing. Or if you're still afraid of needles, imagine a small child having to endure that pain. Now imagine how the dad would feel after honking that horn- totally and completely defeated. All he wanted to do was help his daughter feel better by letting her get as comfortable as possible, so that she didn't have to feel scared anymore.

If your opinion still hasn't shifted and you still would have blared that horn, then you're too selfish too look outside of your needs and this post (and just about everything on this blog) is not for you.

In order to be a decent, socially operable person in society, we have to consider the emotions and situations of other people. Without such consideration, we become much like the technology that we are incessantly developing- cold, calculating and unaware of the environment surrounding us. In other, more human terms, we become jerks.

A quality that I really love about my current boss is that he doesn't like to refer to policy. He wants to figure out what is really happening with each individual client and figure out ways to make him or her as happy with a situation as he can. Yesterday, he told me that all he needs to be cooperative is honesty. He said that a man came in to cancel his membership because he lost his job. His response was "So, you're not going to workout while you look for a job? How about we cover two months of your membership and you can come let me know when you are able to get a job." The guy was so thankful and sure enough, he came back a month later excited to tell that he was able to land a new position.

Nowadays, especially in our capitalist society, there are so many reasons and rhyme to roll over people with policy and fees. I don't mean to say that I disagree with the system entirely, but oftentimes with the people running the machine. At my old gym, the prices were outrageous and if members had any sort of issues with their membership, if it couldn't easily be fixed my boss would use the phrase "that's just the policy". During my first week, management told me "there are two words that we don't use: sorry and unfortunately. Because there is nothing unfortunate about it and we have nothing to be sorry about."

Excuse my foul language, but that's BS! No wonder they kept losing members, they cut out empathy- which is the only factor that creates a genuine foundation of respect and understanding between two people. The sad part is that this lack of respect is all over the place, especially in the Bay Area.

Every morning, I see this elderly man (let's call him Bill) standing by the door. He patiently waits with his walker, until a younger man (let's call him James) pulls up with his car and helps him into it. A few days ago, I spoke with the Bill to find out that his workout is the only thing that he looks forward to. He spends at least two and a half hours doing thousands of reps with his arms, because he can't use his legs as well as he used to. Afterwards, he goes home and watches television- because that's the one thing that he can do comfortably. He told me that some days he just sleeps all day.

James- who I thought to be his son- is actually a man that he met at the gym that had offered to help him out. So, every morning before 6 am, James picks up Bill and helps him into the gym. That's the kind of human selflessness that I like to see.

You never know what's happening in someone else's life. Bill spent his days doing almost nothing because of his disability, but because of James he now he gets to spend even a few minutes a morning talking with another person before doing the activity that he has loved since he was a boy.

Unfortunately, not everyone has been so decent to Bill. On the flip side of the coin, he had to switch from working out in the afternoons to the mornings- because it was too busy. One time, he went to use a machine and asked someone to help him load weight onto it. "The man looked at me, looked at my walker and said 'Why can't you do it, you have legs?'"

This is a special kind of bad human being, but I hope you understand the importance of all of this. It's so easy to pass strangers on the street and disregard them, but what I want you to do is attempt to open your mind. The grumpy man that shoves past you on the busy street, think about why he may be so frustrated. At my old school, there is a faculty member that is nasty towards the students. Everyone dislikes him because he seems to look for reasons to get on their backs. A few days ago, I found out that his wife passed away.

Don't assume you know everything about a person, or that you can even begin to know how they feel. You don't have to understand or even share the same views. Please just do your best to show compassion and love to as many people as you can- you never know who may need your smile, or even the tiniest bit of your

kindness.

Thank you for reading

I love you.

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