While waiting at the airport with my mother due to our seven-hour delay to get to Mongolia 🇲🇳, I did a lot of people watching. I am always fascinated by behavior whether as a social norm or an individual. Often, I find myself imagining what people are thinking or the background behind their actions. 💡
As we were sitting on lounge chairs to pass the time, people came and went to rest before boarding their flights.
Some people dropped their stuff on multiple chairs to lay claim to them while freely coming and going. Some people rested for a few moments and then jumped up to carry on with their business. 🧳 Still others sat down, like we did, pulling out devices 📱and settling in for a long wait.
The seats next to me were generally occupied by a brother and sister 👫, who were like any other kids these days, playing on their devices. Over the period of a couple of hours, they had spread out their things with a sweatshirt hanging on the back of a chair, bags all around, and they were in for the wait.
Finally, the time 🕰 to board their plane 🛫 came and they quickly gathered up their things to stand in line, leaving behind the sweatshirt.
Typical of the lounge seats, they are rarely ever unoccupied for long and soon enough a mother and young daughter swooped in to have their turn in the coveted seats. The mother noticed the sweatshirt hanging off the chair and yelled out to the girl who had just been occupying it. However, the girl was busy putting her things into her backpack 🎒 and no one else was paying attention; so the shout out went unheeded. 🙉
I wondered what the mother would do next while her daughter looked at her with a seemingly similar question. 👩👧
The mother simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, I tried.” To which, her daughter accepted and they carried on. 💁🏽♀️
I almost laughed out loud. 🤦🏽♀️ Was that a reasonable claim to “trying”? 🤔
Only a couple of minutes later, the mother and daughter got up to stand in the same line as the girl who had left the sweatshirt behind. The sweatshirt remained.
Clearly, the mother’s trying was complete and forgotten.
In the meantime, I found myself debating on my own action. In my disbelief with the mother’s claim to have tried, I ran through my own mind 🤯: What is my version of trying? Should I get involved? What if the sweatshirt was actually important to the girl? What if it was the only sweatshirt she had? What if her dead grandmother had given it to her as the last gift she had received from grandma? (Like I said, I can create all kinds of scenarios and drama in my head!🤷🏽♀️)
Seeing the girl up ahead in the line, I processed these questions in the 30 seconds or so that they passed through my mind 🧐 and grabbed the sweatshirt. I needed to stretch my legs anyway. I walked straight up the line, asked the girl if the sweatshirt was hers – to which she acknowledged it was -, smiled as she thanked me and went for my walk. 👍🏽
It was a small act and took very little extra effort of “trying” than shouting out to deaf ears and giving up.
What affected me and still lingers in my mind is the human capacity of lying to ourselves on what it means to “try” without any deep consideration of the results in the action.
To me, one of the main reasons that people are unhappy is a lack of empathy and compassion for others or our possessions. That mother had no concern for the left behind object, nor what it might mean to the person who left it behind.
In our privileged world, we tend to take everything for granted. We lose a sweatshirt, we’ll buy another one. We forget a birthday, there’ll be another one. We haven’t talked to a friend in weeks, they’ll still be there.
Yet, what if that sweatshirt can’t be replaced financially, sentimentally? 😢 A little bit more effort could prevent an emotional disturbance. 🤩
What if there isn’t another birthday for that person? 😥 A simple message to acknowledge their life could make a difference in the final days. 🥰
What if your friend isn’t there next week? 😭 A quick “Hey, thinking of you.” could reconnect you and perhaps be just what was needed for both you and your friend. 😇
Everyday, we make choices. We love to claim that we don’t have time to do this or that choosing to connect with our phones or TV rather than “trying” to participate in the building of humanity. 😔
Rather than express our annoyances or joys with one another, we bury our heads into our devices, or tell ourselves that either we or they are unimportant. Thus, we don’t really ever “try”. 🤐
The mother and daughter in the story sadden me 🥺 because the daughter learned from her mother that both objects and people are only worth a minimal amount of ‘trying’ and any conscience-ness can be shrugged away with “Well, I tried”.
As a humanist, I believe we can do better and that we have a responsibility to “try harder”. 💪🏽
~T 😀
