A little more empathy.

Tears do not come easy to me. I get choked up at times and cannot speak because I am filled with emotion. Mostly it has to do with a beautiful memory or someone that I miss. But tears are usually just one or two out of the corner of my eye. I cried as a young woman, but I have not cried like that in twenty five years. I am just not much of a cryer. I get as sad or as happy as anyone else I think. I am moved as deeply. I just react differently.

This weekend I had an allergic reaction to something in the air and my eyes began to water. Tears. Tears, buckets of tears. It was the first time I had ever reacted so extreme. My eye lids became sore, my nose filled up. I was very uncomfortable. I slept a lot. I took allergy medicine. I needed rest. It gave me so much empathy for those who suffer allergies. I never really understood it. Now I know. 

Today I feel much better, but I am cautious about it happening again, so I will be careful as I go outside and about my day. But I start today with more empathy in my heart than before. Empathy being that ability to put yourself in someone else's place and understand their experience. Every time something happens to us we glean more understanding about the lives of others.

And we need to know. It is so easy to dismiss someone else's experiences. But we are all carrying something. We all have our reasons for being who we are. We have stories by the bucketfuls by the time we hit forty, fifty or sixty. We know things. And these things we know because we have seen and felt them.

And once we know we have more empathy. It opens us up to the lives of others. We see things from their side of the street. Even sometimes we might not like what we see, we understand why things are the way they are. It does not make it right necessarily, but we can see how it all played out.

And this makes us less judgemental, or at least it should. I always think that as a human with a brain, it is natural to judge. I judge all the time just to make simple decisions. I am judgemental, no doubt about it. I just know that I have no right to be. So when I find myself assessing someone else and playing the role of judge, I try to remember that if I were in their shoes, I might do the same.

Just this fall, over twenty years after my mother's death my sister sent around a little piece from the newspaper that my mother had clipped about just this idea. A little lesson for us all to remember that but for the grace of God, there I go. It is interesting what we can be reminded of and learn or relearn in just one weekend. And it is a good thing to learn, to be reminded, even if sometimes it is hard. We go forward kinder, more sensitive, more tender because we know.