We go through life. We get caught up in the details of day-to-day living. We feel the pressure of everything we ‘have to’ or ‘need to’ do. We exhaust ourselves trying to live up to the often impossibly high standards we set for ourselves, beating ourselves up when we fail to live up to the perfect expectations we had set.
Inevitably, we will make mistakes. We are human, so we will stumble and fall.
If you’re like me, though, those mistakes aren’t always accepted so easily. I say I have an overactive guilty conscience, and while thankfully that conscience and my desire to be able to look myself in the mirror often help guide me on the ‘right’ path, it is a grueling taskmaster when I feel I haven’t lived up to the person I expected and wanted myself to be.
When I was much younger, maybe around 9 or 10, I attended summer day camp. I don’t remember all the details anymore, but I do remember that there was one boy who was the recipient of some kind of teasing and mocking by a number of campers. While I wasn’t one of the children doing the teasing, I also didn’t do anything about it. And when they pulled some kind of prank on him, I think I laughed.
This was more years ago than I’m going to admit here, and I still remember that I did nothing to help, nothing to stop it. Not only that – I laughed! I don’t remember whether I thought it was funny or whether it was just trying to fit in, but to me, it doesn’t matter.
Even in my own mind, I know I was young. I know this was a long time ago, but somehow I still find myself occasionally thinking about that moment. I hope that that he doesn’t even think about it, that it is long forgotten for him, and yet I’m scared that somehow that moment left its imprint on him, perhaps even to this day.
Those ‘small’ moments matter. Enough of those small moments can add up over time, building walls and shattering hearts, even long after those moments have passed and may have been forgotten by most.
Enough of those moments of struggling, of feeling like the outsider, the ‘odd man out’, can leave a person drifting, feeling like they don’t belong.
And we get busy in our day-to-day lives. Sometimes the voices in our own minds are so overpowering and deafening, we find ourselves tuned out, struggling or unable to hear the inner cries from the hearts of the people we encounter.
Maybe they pass by the periphery of our lives, but we barely see them, so caught up are we in what is happening in our own minds, our own hearts, our own lives – which, in many ways, is human and completely understandable.
And yet they may feel like they are falling through the cracks of this world, struggling to find a place where they feel they belong and matter.
Maybe they put on a smile to face the world. Maybe they truly live with joy most of the time, while sometimes that pain threatens to swallow them from within.
Sometimes we are the ones who need someone to really see the ‘true’ us and show us that we matter.
And sometimes we are the ones who have to open our eyes and our hearts to show others how important they are to us, showing them that only do we see them, we also care – from deep, deep within.
Heart and Soul Living 