Tuesday 30 October 2012

A small BIG Lesson


 
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of  empathy - Meryl Streep
...
  
Today at the supermarket I bumped into one of my ex-colleagues. On seeing her, my first reaction was to pretend to be busy shopping in order to avoid talking to her.  I know that is not a nice thing to do, but with this lady I have always tried to limit our conversations to work related matters only. However, I am glad that things turned out differently today.  Just as I was trying to ignore this lady, she came up to me and greeted me.  After exchanging pleasantries, we ended up having a long chat. 

I had always thought of her as an insensitive and selfish person. In the past, I have known her to laugh at others’ misfortunes such as someone under depression, someone getting stressed about trying to conceive, someone unable to cope with job pressure so on and so forth. Sometimes I wondered if she laughed as a reflex! 

To be fair to her, I think basically she lacked empathy and lacked the ability to step into other person’s shoes and consider how they may be feeling.  As a result she used to come off as mean and uncaring.

Surprisingly, today she came off as a nice person.  It was good to hear how she had nice things to say about some of our common friends. However, I was sorry to learn of her health issues and that currently she has been going through a particularly difficult phase in her life. This has changed her attitude remarkably and it has placed her in a position where she can truly see what goes on for others.  

Sometimes life has a peculiar way of teaching us valuable lessons. Bad things could just happen to anyone and most of the time through no fault of their own. When somebody is in despair, we may not perfectly understand their situation or what they must be going through at that moment (unless of course, we have experienced it ourselves) but certainly, we can be empathetic to them. It takes nothing away from us to show some kindness and compassion, even if it is to someone who we hardly care about otherwise.  

6 comments:

  1. True, there are occasions when we pre judge or jump to conclusions.

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  2. A H,

    JIS TAN LAAGE, WO TAN JAANE,
    KAUN JAANE PEER PRAYEE.

    Pinch is felt by the one who wears the shoe. We should never make mockery of a person who is suffering but even if we can not fully understand his or her pain, we should offer our shoulder to lean on.

    Take care

    ReplyDelete
  3. You are right sometimes situations happen which make us realise what we are doing ..

    she may seem like that at work, because i have seen that people are different in work environment then outside ..

    Bikram's

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ah been there! There are sometimes we are extremely prejudiced to somethings and some icebreakers as such come and change our perspective a 180 degree!!

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    Hey - a favor : Can you please visit your settings and remove CAPTCHA / word verification. It irks the readers and reduces the number of visits to your blog :)

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    ReplyDelete
  5. Another lovely post, AH. So simple but thought-provoking. As a writer of comedy (ahem!) I am aware of the rule "Everything is funny as long as it's happening to someone else." but what you say has a lot of merit!

    ReplyDelete

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