Yesterday I went to the public library where I found a quiet spot to do some work. I don’t typically go to the library when I have meetings to take, so although locked into my work, I love people watching so I’m always pretty curious about what is going on around me. The library is a beautiful place where you can see so much life. The very young and the very old converge to create a space of history, depth, and wisdom.
I had found a quiet spot by the window on the second floor where I sometimes sat and about thirty minutes after I had been set up, I could, both very quietly and simultaneously, hear both a man and a woman weeping. I looked around at first unable to identify where that was coming from, when I saw a man below on the first floor hunched over wiping away his tears. Looking around I noticed the woman not to far from me on the second-floor weeping into her tissue. It was unlike anything I had experienced before in my hundreds of times being at the local library. I had never simultaneously witnessed a man and woman, from two separate parties, two different ages, silently weeping to themselves.
I felt my heart heavy and the yearning to comfort them both, realizing that we are all doing our best at every moment to live this life experience and also realizing this was a moment that was for them to work through and not for me to infiltrate.
We are so caught up from day-to-day about the impacts of the world and our own journey that we often times forget to stop and realize that we are all doing the best we can.
I left that library feeling grateful to have a moment of reflection while also feeling the deep empathy for the journey that we are all existing on.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope we can all find the deep empathy within ourselves to remember that we are all carrying a different weight on our shoulders, every single day.
