Taking the long road home…

Friday night. Some Friday nights you’re busting to get home. The weekend in all its splendor awaits, and you charge into the traffic, and before your know it, you’re home.

Other Friday nights, when the week seems ten days long, it’s comforting to spend a few minutes (or maybe a few hours) gaining succour from friends and colleagues in the comfort of a local bar. Life is too short to go home feeling the burn behind your eyes and the prickle across your nose that makes you squeeze up your eyelids, and you pretend that these are allergies you’re feeling, but really you’re a word, just one word, away from weeping like a lost child.

The people around you don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t mean at work, although that might also be true. I’m talking about the concern that one person has for another. They might not be ‘mothering’ you, but they’re there to be company, to listen, to nod sympathetically when you tell your story of the latest office horror.

They know it. Perhaps not your exact story, but they’ve got their own fears, their own horror happening too. It’s the same for them as it is for you. It’s called terror management.

So it’s important that you add your support. Be there for others. You might think your contribution is tiny. It might be. You simply turned up, maybe had a beer, maybe not. In the bigger picture, though, while your contribution perhaps appears tiny, the effect is cumulative. Powerful. Transformative.

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” — George Eliot describing Dorothea in Middlemarch

Manifesto:
03. Every day is an opportunity to reflect on the past.
10. Every day connect with somebody.
15. Every day make a difference to yourself and others.

Fresh New Day