Got it... even if only briefly

I just want you to know I’m aware I do a LOT of complaining in these posts.

This is, after all, MY journal and my vehicle to process the situations and minutiae of my life.

I love knowing that many of you find my words worth reading but, ultimately, this is about me.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover that the whiny, internally critical, endlessly ‘processing’ princess is not always the persona that comes across in my daily life.

Within a span of 24 hrs, several interactions have helped me recognize that even on days when my blog post feels and sounds like I’m channeling Ebenezer Scrooge, Andy Rooney and Oscar the Grouch, all rolled into one, I apparently can still be perceived as someone who actually DOES care, and cares deeply, for the other human beings with whom I share this planet.

And that perception is accurate; I DO; sometimes so much so that I need to distance from it in sarcasm or humor.

One situation recently touched me deeply and temporarily changed my world view which is always a good thing.

When you work in a company of any size, you can’t ‘know’ everyone who crosses your path.

You see them, hear them, even exchange pleasantries with them, but ‘knowing’…that’s something else.

So I was surprised when she stopped by because I don’t know her, although I see her almost everyday.

A lovely, older woman in our Housekeeping department, with broken English, a delightful ‘foreign’ accent, always smiling and eager to help with whatever you want, sensitive to the point of timidity about being in the way or being intrusive.

She asked for permission to speak; she asked me what my job was and, before I could even formulate how I should answer, she said, “because you seem like someone I can trust; I’ve heard you speak of God and I think I’ve even seen you pray. I don’t know if you think your God is the same one to whom I pray but I need your prayers”.

For the next 45 minutes, as she sat in my office, she spoke of the family she had been forced to leave behind in Afghanistan.

A college educated woman who planned to escape from the terror of war with her husband and sons, only to have her husband, father and brother in law killed in front of her eyes three days before they left.

A woman now worried about the toll war was having on her youngest brother “whose mind has been distorted” and who, even after shock treatment and anti psychotic medicine, sits alone in their village talking to himself of a vengeful God, demons and satanic forces beyond his control; of her middle brother who has been diagnosed with renal failure and of her older brother who recently had surgery which successfully removed shrapnel from his eye but which couldn’t restore his vision.

Tearfully, she said how frightening it was to know her family is doing so poorly when she was so far away and so unable to help.

In a hushed whisper, she admitted it was even harder when she felt so grateful to be in her new country and relatively safe.

I reassured her that Mohamad Subhan, Sultan Aziz and Hashmat ‘ullah would be added to my prayers; as would she, Zarghona.

The world both enlarged and contracted during that conversation.

A distant land that has been only alien and 'other' morphed into a country filled with towns and villages filled with families and individuals.

Individuals who love each other, individuals who do unspeakable things to each other, individuals who have the same fragile human conditions we do and whose families worry about them and feel helpless just as we do.

And, in a brief moment of grace, I really got it; it's NOT just about me...

it's about all the other 'me's out there as well...

it's about US.