Recently, I experienced my world coming to a halt and it’s a terrifying event. It is to my most solemn belief that life is weird, fantastical, random and beautiful. However, our world is spinning around us and there are times in this spin that the randomness of life can also be cruel.
As we go about our daily lives our stories intertwine, overlap and collide. Our daily routines bring us into contact with hundreds of people every single day, and we often forget how much impact we have on each other. I find this completely and utterly outrageous. I’ve observed (in my limited time in the crazy galactic swirl that is life) that we are a generation of people who do not like to slow down whether it be to drive 5 mph slower to go the speed limit or even when it comes to sending texts. So on the occasions that we do slow down or worse stop our busy lives that it’s often (and only) because a crisis has emerged.
For me, the atomic bomb into my life was my father’s emergency visit to the hospital with extremely high blood pressure. My fast-paced busy life stopped instantly. This by all definitions was a family crisis. I was in shock, I was entirely unsure of what to do; nobody prepares themselves for situations like this.
Luckily for me, my family responded quickly and the top priority quickly became each other. We all backed one another. My sister made sure everybody had eaten. My brother took off work to be by my dad’s bedside and I made sure he and my mom had overnight bags.
We also had people slow down their lives to care for us. It was then I realized how important we are to each other. We act as lifelines for those around us and many times we don’t even know it.
It was the concerned phone calls, texts and people that took time out of their day to check up on me that helped me get through what had happened and get back into my daily routine. These small acts of kindness got my family through our crisis.
These people may not even be aware of how much their kindness meant.
Life swirls around us everyday, that’s a fact. Day in and day out we encounter hundreds of people. If we all could consciously remember to slow down our spin we could make our school a better place. When you slow down and take time to care for others it becomes apparent how intertwined we actually are. It’s at that point that you can’t help but to care.