The Presence of Others

I rarely have a bad day, but this morning certainly seemed to be tipping in that direction.  I'm getting slightly sick, am mulling over a schedule conflict wherein I need to choose between personal and professional life, and Trump is doing Trump things which always feels bad.  And then as I hurried to the train to get downtown, the 1 train wasn't stopping in the direction I needed because of a medical emergency.  I had to go uptown three stops, and transfer to a downtown train......Things just seemed to be piling on.

On the train, I happened to sit down next to a man named Ron.  On the other side of Ron was a friend of his, and on the other side of this friend was a woman that kept reminding them not to share the voices in their heads.  They would talk about or to people that weren't there, and she was obviously there to oversee them as their caregiver.  A few stops later, another similar group got one, speaking to themselves, swaying, with another caregiver that acknowledged the first group.  

I was swept from my world of worries to theirs.  They lived in another reality, one in which there weren't scheduling conflicts which required their own volition, one in which somebody else helped them get from one place to another, one in which perhaps even Trump couldn't touch them.  Their world was something foreign to me, and to the other people on the train.  It belonged to them and within them.  It most certainly had its own fears, angers, sorrows, but they were not my own.  It was such a relief to be in their presence for several stops and to be taken out of myself.

I finally arrived at my destination and walked into an Early Childhood Education Suzuki class.  And once again, I was taken outside of myself for the next hour, absorbed in young minds discovering the world around them.  These were still worlds with sorrow, of distance from mom and finding her again, of confusion, of pain.  But living in these other realities took me away from my own.  It was because they were real that they pulled me out of myself. 

I think finding another's pain, joy, suffering, happiness, is one of the best ways to open the window a little wider.  We need not only be ourselves.  There is a whole other world to see when we borrow the presence of others.