Actions Speak Loud With Some Words

When trying to live my life by practicing what I preach, in terms of everyone matters and all people have value, I've found things harder than before. Really, the struggle now seems to be NOT acknowledging people around me.

Like most people - scratch that - like ALL people, I have initial impressions about those I see around me. I won't lie, the other day when there was a mentally handicapped man on the train stopping and talking to various people, I didn't want him to talk to me. To reduce the chances of this, I knew I needed to NOT acknowledge him - which was really hard! I think I couldn't fully ignore everything except my own existence in the world and looked in his direction.

He started talking to me.

I had two options: be a humongous jerk and completely ignore him or politely acknowledge him with limited responses. I chose the latter. But even as I started in with my tight smile and short answers, I found myself quickly becoming much less defensive about interacting with him.

Why?

Because I had eyes, to start with. I could see how everyone else looked at him, averted their gaze when he approached or completely ignored him. And this observation made me really sad. I'm no angel. I'm guilty of doing all of these things on a probably more frequent basis than I even realize. However, my attitude-changing thought on the train was: What if this was me? How incredibly lonely and degrading and dehumanizing would it be to essentially be excluded from interactions of everyday society because you are different and can't help it? It would be a completely different story if he was a drunk on the train and terrorizing people. But he wasn't. He was [probably] a mid-30s, bearded man, complimenting people on their shirts.

That was the first reason I quickly changed my stance on talking to him. The second reason was gratitude - You could tell that he was genuinely happy about talking with another person. If I wasn't completely sure of this, the smile and twinkle in his eyes definitely gave it away.

What did we talk about?

Actually, it was still just me giving short acknowledging responses to the statements [I could understand] about his train destination plans for the afternoon. But through this he was able to share and (sort of?) make connections with others [i.e. me] around him.

Taking time to adjust my instinctive impression and being open to talking with this man on the train may not seem like a big deal. And it may not have meant anything to the man at all. But regardless of the meaning on the receiving end, I know I can feel good about upholding my own standards and giving everyone a chance of at least a small bit of human dignity.

Again, It might not seem like much, but just imagine if everyone was willing to make such small efforts! That's the world I want to live in and I'm trying my best to lead by example. Will you join me?