The Person in Front of You

Today, remember this.

So much of the frustration I create for myself comes from treating the person in front of me as a problem to solve.

The slow driver. The rude check-out worker. The colleague who just doesn't seem to understand what I need. The family member who keeps pressing exactly the wrong buttons.

My instinct is almost always the same.

Why are they doing this?
What is wrong with this person?
Can't they see what's happening here?

It's an easy trap to fall into because, from the inside of our own lives, everyone else can feel like an interruption. They're the thing standing between us and wherever we're trying to get to.

But every so often I'm reminded that the person frustrating me is almost certainly living a story every bit as rich and complicated as my own.

John Green, in his amazing book, Paper Towns, describes this as imagining other people complexly. David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech This Is Water makes a similar point. We spend so much of life trapped inside our own perspective that we forget everyone else is carrying invisible burdens, private hopes, and worries we'll never know about.

When I remember that, irritation has a remarkable tendency to soften into curiosity and wonder. Maybe even empathy.

This came into full focus for me recently, when I was flying home to Houston after visiting family in Scotland.

My connection through Newark was painfully tight. Every minute mattered, and every small delay felt just a little bit personal.

Standing in the queue for passport control was a man who looked even more stressed than I was. He kept checking his watch, texting frantically, looking over people's shoulders, shifting from foot to foot. The more anxious he became, the more irritated I became.

Why couldn't he just relax? Why was he making everyone else more stressed?

Then I happened to notice his boarding pass. He was trying to make the very same flight to Houston. In an instant, the story I was telling myself changed.

We weren't opponents. We weren't even strangers with different problems. We were two people worried about exactly the same thing. The only difference was how we were expressing it.

Maybe missing that flight would've been a minor inconvenience for me but a disaster for him. Maybe he struggles with anxiety. Maybe someone was waiting for him. Maybe there was something happening in his life that I couldn't possibly see.

The truth is, I don't know. I never will.

But simply allowing for the possibility that there was a perfectly understandable explanation transformed my experience of those few minutes. He didn't change. I did.

The older I get, the more I think this is one of the lesser-known superpowers available to all of us. Not pretending that difficult behaviour is acceptable. Not excusing genuine cruelty.

Just resisting the urge to assume that the story we invent about someone else is the correct one. Most people are doing the best they can with circumstances we know almost nothing about. Sometimes remembering that is enough.