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Last night while waiting patiently at the door to get into a store, a young man my age aggressively shoved me out of the way. I stumbled onto the ground. A store employee saw what happened and came to help me then confronted the man. Here are my thoughts in order of appearance:
1. What just happened? I’m ok.
2. This reminds me of last week when I told a woman her headlight was out, and she screamed at me. It would be so much easier to not help people. It would be easier to believe people are bad to protect myself.
2. This reminds me of last week when I told a woman her headlight was out, and she screamed at me. It would be so much easier to not help people. It would be easier to believe people are bad to protect myself.
3. No, I choose to keep my heart open. I choose to live in the world with the risk that comes with having an open heart, and believing that people are good. This could easily be a choice that I make, that makes me feel better than him somehow.
4. If I can have enough hurt to have good cause to shut off from others but keep my heart open, what has allowed me to do that? What resources, internally and externally do I have that allowed me to do that?
5. What happened to him in his life that he treated me that way? What made him become angry and violent towards a patient stranger? What do I have access to that he does not? How am I the one who is richer here?
6. How am I like him? What if we both had the same pain, but I was shown how to sooth pain to keep my heart open, and he never was? How does seeing myself like him change how I feel about him?
7. I’m so grateful that I was not alone, and that the kindness of the store employee revealed itself through this unexpected moment of fear.
8. I guess all those years of seeing people’s pain up close, and sitting with my own, makes it harder to objectify a violent other. I thought I was helping others when I sat with their pain, but really they were transforming me.
9. Ouch my knee.
9. Ouch my knee.
