To preface, let me give you an idea of how my mental state is doing this week.
I just stopped my car at the opening of a parking lot to let someone get out, it was a girl about my age. As she steered out and around me, we looked at each other, she said thank you, and I started crying.
This place can be a lot sometimes— and by this place I mean this planet. There is so much going on, both good and bad, not only in our own lives but just all around us, and sometimes it can get hard to keep up and the littlest things can illicit the most unexpected reactions.
It's important to note, though, that the cry I had wasn’t one of sadness. Between two jobs, taking 15 hours, involvement in organizations, attempting to have a social life, etc. everything has been moving at 1,000 miles a minute for me and I have let the stress get the best of me far too many times in the recent weeks. In that particular moment, though, when a stranger thanked me for letting her pass, I was suddenly overcome with such a wave of gratefulness and comfort in the state of the world around me.
Sure, not everything is perfect. But no matter what is going on at any given time, it seems that the inherent nature of people is to simply want to be kind. They want to be allowed to pass and thank the person who gave them the space to do so. They want the door held open when following closely behind someone and to hold it for whoever comes after them. They want to smile at the strangers they make eye contact with in the streets and be sure to thank their baristas, waiters, etc. and genuinely make sure they feel appreciated. I believe it’s truly rare for someone to go out in to the world actively wanting to inflict pain or spread negativity. We are all just a sum of our experiences and our surroundings and sometimes the situations we find ourselves in might throw us down into a rut, but that doesn’t mean we want to stay there. I really do feel that, deep down, we all just want to be treated with kindness and grace and to do the same for other people (as this is so plain to see in even the littlest everyday interactions).
So I’m thinking about kindness, about how I want to hug that girl for thanking me, and about all the time I have wasted recently getting in my head and worrying and stressing when I could just be enjoying all of the good that constantly surrounds me. In particular I have been trying to be more present and intentional in my relationships, and in doing so realized how much I had missed out on by being so burrowed in my own head. All the people I love have been dealing with their own stresses and worries and as I’ve gone to them in the last week or so and listened to them lay out all of their thoughts, hopes, and worries and watched their brains churn behind their tired eyes, I’ve caught on to a common theme in my response.
Which brings me to this not-so-smooth transition and the final part of my incoherent ramble; silver linings. I want to focus on them more so that I can be better not only for myself but also for the people around me. I’ve thought a lot lately about just one concept in particular that I find myself preaching to other people (and yes, I’m currently in the process of teaching myself to take my own advice) and I think its the most trustworthy silver lining we’ve got— the sheer continuity of things.
It’s inevitable that sometimes in their toughest or darkest moments, people can find themselves succumbing to that hopeless feeling and letting themselves fall into a rut, leading them to believe that this moment is their forever—I don’t know about you but I have for sure let myself fall into this more times than I’d like to admit. What has saved me time and time again is remembering that life does in fact go on. I like to remind myself in those less than perfect moments that this is one small blip in what is an enormous and still unwritten lifetime. Even when things aren’t going your way, know that at any point near the equator, Earth is always moving at nearly 1,000 miles per hour. Know that you will always see the sun in the morning and the moon at night. Know that there are currently over 7.5 billion people in the world who are going about their days and experiencing their own triumphs and struggles and that we all go to sleep each night and get to wake up to an entirely new day. So think about it like this, everything goes on no matter the circumstances—so why shouldn't we?
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