This thing we call life can be a funny dance partner.
A story to illustrate. It’s your story and mine and it’s everyone’s story. Because the day began like any other but …
Life. You never know.
One evening not long ago at all, we were sitting on benches and chairs off the lobby of a big hotel, a very unrehearsed scenario, eating take-out supper off paper plates, at the end of a three-hour bus ride on the way to play baseball games.
Maybe just for moral support, I said that if I acted weird at any point during this trip it was because I’d eaten lunch with my mom and she was having surgery Thursday and all was well but … it was my mom, in her mid-80s, and …
It was my mom.
And that after that I’d visited one of my bosses in the emergency room because at four in the morning, she thought she was having a stroke she was only 50 and the doctors in West Monroe were sending her to Alexandria to a specific neurosurgeon and so I walked in and she started crying and then I started crying and I told her I was crying only because the hospital gown she had on was SO not her color and …
She was scared. Because she didn’t know what was wrong. Nobody knew what was wrong. Legit excuse for tears … I guess mine were just because we didn’t always get along at first, which is fine because it was professional and not personal, but I was scared because she was scared and I have grown fond of her and we all want her to be well.
And then I got a text that one of my hero sports writing brothers was having a surgery that was invasive like Germany invading Poland in 1939 was invasive and …
So, it’s not a good day and no one should be in this pickle it’s just a cross you have to bear because as usual, you are thinking of only yourself…
But … you never know. Because …
Then one of the guys who’d been on the bus — again, we’d been talking for three hours already, just jokes, but now for just a few minutes it was different — said his mom had cancer surgery that week and his niece had just called to say that while all was well so far, the doctors were confused why something wasn’t acting the way it should so …
And then another friend said, well, his dad, one of the great humans in history, had been checked into a nursing home that very morning and was not enamored with it at all but that no one in the family could physically handle this once vibrant and wonderful personality because his mind was going and …
You come to the same conclusion you’ve come to lots of times before. Doesn’t make it easier to accept. But you know it’s a dead solid fact. And that’s this …
Life is difficult. It’s a bear. It’s wonderful — colors and sounds and senses, and who can capture it all? how spectacular it is when it’s all going your way — but you never know what someone is going through. A person can be coaching a baseball game or preparing a sermon or teaching second grade or … you just don’t know. Their mom might be in surgery. Their aging dad might be in a situation he doesn’t understand. Their toddler might have just lost her mom to some tragedy or their salt-of-the-earth grandfather might have just passed away.
So …
Try to make someone smile today. Use your heart parts. Sincere goodwill is our ace in the hole, no matter the storm.
It’s a little thing, but it could be a big thing. For them, but for you too. Make the world a place that’s happier. You can do that.
No matter the cost, it will be worth it. It will come back, bread upon the water.
We need you.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu or Twitter at @MamaLuvsManning
