“What did you say?” asked the five-year old boy alertly, addressing his wife and child. “They’re going to burn down the school tomorrow? Let me take care of this.”
With that, he strode to the other side of the block center, picked up the Fisher Price telephone, and dialed the fire station. “Hello? Chief? Yes, Chief? They’re going to burn down the school…No, no, I don’t know why.” (He looks to his mystified wife who shakes a puzzled head.) “Hmmm, yes, of course I’ll help. Be right there.”
He rummaged through the trunk of dress-up clothes to find a hardhat and rubber galoshes. Exchanging his ball cap and elbow length purple evening gloves for clothes more suited to rescue work, he dashed off to lend the understaffed fire chief a hand.
(Upon his return, his family heard the glad news: the crisis had been averted —yay! And everyone breathed a sigh of relief — whew! The end! — clap, clap!)
With simple props and vivid imaginations, these children and my other kindergarteners spent their days as kings, queens, shopkeepers, fire fighters, and (always, always) mommies, daddies, and teenagers. They played house, played castle, played good guys and bad guys, played school. And with every wig, hat, coat, and necklace, there grew in these young human beings a desire to know what it felt like to be someone else, to walk around life with a different point of view.
They were on to something. Something helpful happens inside us when we put ourselves in another person’s place and deliberately envision being them, hearing what they hear, doing what they do. We start to develop a sense of them – a sense of living in their skin, thinking like them, talking like them. (Perhaps even dressing like them, especially if we’re partial to evening gloves.)
Intentionally stepping into someone else’s life means pausing to look around, picking up the phone, writing the little note, looking into their eyes, breathing with them for a while. It means we get closer to identifying with others, seeing what we have in common, understanding more than we did before. It means we don’t rush to advise, summarize, minimize, or organize. Instead, we clump around in their high heels for a while to get a feel for how they balance.
On the face of it, this is easier said than done. How can we possibly know what to do for the widowed mom with children to raise, the cousin devastated by a flooded home, or the dad mourning his son’s suicide, when we lack first-hand knowledge of such pain? What about talking to the friend with the terminal diagnosis, or the parent consumed by advancing Alzheimer’s, or the friend with the special-needs infant? So many lives, so many situations we can only guess at — what if we do or say the wrong thing?
While it’s true that the needs are great, and that we can bruise when we mean to console, it’s also true that we should not wait until everything is perfect in order to put ourselves in someone else’ s shoes. And as painful as saying the wrong thing is, saying nothing hurts as well.
So, I think we begin by saying “hello”.
A friend told me her painful divorce was followed by an equally painful silence, as all the friends who didn’t know what to say just….didn’t. She understood it, but it didn’t make it hurt less. When I asked her would have helped, she said simply, “Saying ‘hello’ would be nice.”
“Hello.”
It’s going toward someone in distress. It’s putting on the hardhat and galoshes (or feather boa and high heels, if that’s more your style) and heading out toward the person who needs you. It’s putting yourself in the place of someone else, to the best of your knowledge and imagination, asking yourself: What can I learn from the body language, the tone of voice? What might help me if I lost my belongings in a flood, or my independence through an accident, or my link to my past through the death of a parent? If I were new in town, what would I need?
I may not have had to move and start over, but I have known lost camaraderie through cooled friendships. I may not have been jarred by sudden unemployment, but I have lain awake at night wondering how to pay for the unexpected car repair. Maybe my child isn’t in a literal jail, but there are other ways to be imprisoned. In other words, though our stories vary in the details, they distill to shared hopes, dreams, joys, sorrows. So when we acknowledge our shared humanity, we are freed to move, however imperfectly, into one another’s lives.
Thinking like this leads to any number of simple, friendly gestures – the equivalent of a bottle of water and a sense of companionship. I still get notes, emails, treats, gift cards, flowers, candles, hugs. They still feel great. Friends leave me voice mails letting me know they are praying for me, they check in on holidays, they let me know they still miss Jack, still think of our family, still pray for our sons, still, still, still…They are still there, still reaching out without expecting much back. Some of them have been widowed, though most have not. But what they do have is a sense of compassion, and the knowledge that, as they come toward me, they bring hope and help. They just grab their hardhats and come.
Simple enough even a kindergartener can do it.
