‘Next time you meet someone that you care about, try to be more compassionate and less reactive toward them. It might be the last time you see them’ – Sam Harris.
These were the words I heard in a guided meditation recently. It was so impactful that after carrying it throughout the day, I decided to sit down and share with you all how this sentence affected me. Not only because it reminded me of our finitude (yes, we will all die one day in spite of some tech bros wanting to change that – good luck to them), but more importantly our ability to forget what is truly meaningful in life.
So many times, the people closest to us, the ones we care the most are the ones who end up getting our impatience, our discontent and our temper. When the pandemic started back in 2020, it was clear that family and health became everyone’s priorities which gave us the opportunity to rethink how we would live our lives going forward. Here we are, 3 years on and now we need to have prompts like the one I received to refresh my memory of what matters most, because the world kind of went back to how it was.
One of the invitations here is to simply tweak our attention and exercise the power of presence. That’s it. So as we start a new day, I would highly recommend that we give the ones we care the best of us, not the rest of us. When an old relative calls, pick up the phone to hear the same story again. As you leave the house, kiss your loved ones goodbye as you mean it. When a colleague at work asks for your time, invite them to sit down and look into their eyes as you truly listen to what they have to say. You get the gist.
Compassion is the key to a kinder world. Try it and let me know what you think. We have one life and it is precious, don’t waste it.
Compassion
