THE TRUTH ABOUT FEELING.

Sometimes I can feel the realities of the world straining on my shoulders, and it's all too much for me. The good and the bad -- the beauty of human kindness and how many colors exist in everything and the ugliness of unrelenting hatred and the greyness that spews out of that.  

And, lately it seems that there are a lot of people who feel helpless in a world where so much is happening. I find myself in conversations with friends who watch news stories and then get sad by the things they can’t do to help all the people in the world who are feeling pain. Or, I get an e-mail with a sad story in it, about some human, in the midst of Botswana who is sick and the person who sent it to me will write something like, “I read this every day and try to figure out how I can change this.” Or, I sit with someone watching the news about Libya and she throws her arms up in the air and says, “This is all too much now.” Or, I hear something in my office about a trip someone has been on to some place in the former Soviet Union where people deal with the struggles of poverty every day and they tell me that they’re moved and they wish they could do more.

And then I think about those same people in day-to-day life and how they treat people that are right in front of them. I think about how the same guy who sends me sad stories about people from Botswana is the same person who deserted a girl he loved at a bus station when she came to visit him on a free weekend, because he got too drunk to be mindful of the time she was coming in, and I think about how the same gal who is suddenly overwhelmed by Libya, just told me how ugly some girl was walking down the streets who she doesn’t even know, and about how the person who saw poverty in the Soviet Union never even stops to acknowledge the homeless man begging on the streets. And, I think about all the people who want to change the universe, but they forget how to love and give and support the people they interact with every day.

I am just like them.  I’ve done things I regret, made choices I shouldn’t have, hurt people I love, judged wrongly. I’m flawed, and we’re all human. But I like to believe in the power of little moments of kindness and positivity. I like to believe that maybe if I just smile once at a stranger, I can alleviate a little bit of pain that the world is having.

I like to believe that if every person who existed in the world invested more care in the people around them, then every one, every where would be happy. Maybe we can’t fly across the universe; or maybe we don’t have the money to give to organizations; or maybe we can’t perform surgery that will fix diseases; or maybe we can’t build walls strong enough to prevent oceans from consuming land or floors sturdy enough to stay intact when the earth shakes; but we can hold doors for people. We can be there for our friends when they’re hurting, and we can put band aids on people who fall, and we can learn how to smile at people who don’t look like us (have you ever stared at people and noticed how different we ALL really look?).  

And maybe, slowly, we don’t have to feel helpless, knowing that the world really is ours and that our actions are far more powerful than we ever knew they could be.

(Photo credit: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Georgia, FSU 2011).