Non-negotiables

I cannot tell you the number of times I have treated a person a certain way, or had some preconceived notion about their attitude or behavior, or reacted to them in some way that I later wish I hadn’t. I cannot tell you how many times I have responded negatively to someone but later learned the rest of their story. 

You know, someone treats you rudely, badly, unfairly, and you react only to find out later they are going through some difficult situation. Maybe the baby didn’t sleep so they didn’t sleep, maybe they are struggling with their teenager, maybe they are in an insecure spot in their marriage, maybe they are dealing with an aging parent, maybe they were just diagnosed. Somehow, having this information, we soften, we become more patient, we offer kindness and understanding. I know, I am telling you, I have been there and done that more times than I care to mention. 

But I think we can do better. I think we can decide how we want to treat people. I think we can make it our non-negotiable. I think we can treat people kindly, no matter what. 

Let me explain.

Years ago I was mentoring one of our new teachers. She had a keen interest in her students and their well-being and worked hard to find ways to connect and empower them. At the time, she was planning a professional development session to share some of her best practices with other teachers. She was especially interested in reaching and meeting the needs of students in poverty.

One day during planning, she asked my opinion about teachers taking a sort of tour of the school district. A tour that would mostly include seeing some of the more poverty-stricken areas of the district we served. I had heard of this practice before, mostly when reading other professional works about efforts districts and schools have made to inform their staff of the needs of their students. In practice, teachers and other school personnel would load on buses, and they would literally tour the poorer areas to see where it is their students were coming from. To see the poverty. To see the struggle. To see the need. 

Now let’s take a few steps back. Back to my own upbringing as a child of poverty. We didn’t call it “poverty” when I was a kid. If we talked about it, we called it poor. We were poor and we knew it. We knew we were 9 people living in a small two-bedroom house. We knew we didn’t have central air or heat and that on any given day the front door was wide open and there were fans propped up in the screen-less open windows. We knew we bought our groceries with government issued funds and we felt the red hot embarrassment every time we used them at the check stand. We knew we wore secondhand clothes often dropped off by other families who were aware of what we were lacking. 

What I didn’t need was someone seeing the chipping paint of our tiny wooden house or the rusted tin roof. What I didn’t need was someone seeing the hodge-lodge chicken wire enclosing our front yard where we kept the chickens. What I didn’t need was someone seeing the cars and trailers that littered our property as a reminder of the multitude of broken dreams and unplanned catastrophes. What I didn’t need was someone looking at our poverty in order to decide whether or not I was worth offering additional help, care, kindness, or understanding. I didn’t need anyone, especially a bus filled with teachers from presumably the “other side of the tracks,” seeing what we didn’t have as a determining factor of what I needed. 

What I did need, was not for people to see where I was, but rather to help me navigate where I was going. I needed people to see me, not the place I crawled out of everyday. I needed teachers, adults, mentors, to help me see a future worthy of my gifts, regardless of my past or present. I needed patience, kindness, and understanding, with no prerequisites to deserve it. 

My guess is, everyone needs patience, kindness, and understanding. My guess is everyone deserves people to see the best of where they are going without regard to where they are right now. My guess is no matter what we do or do not know about someone or what they are going through, people are always going through something.

To answer the teacher’s question, I said, “I will tell you this. If a busload of teachers would have passed by my house, I would have quit school that day. I didn’t need anyone seeing the source of my shame to help me get where I needed to go.”

I shared with her what it was like when I was growing up. After we talked, we both realized and reaffirmed the importance of having some non-negotiables. We realized and reaffirmed the importance of treating all people with the absolute best we had to give. We realized and reaffirmed we can treat people kindly. All of the people, all of the time.

We can make it our own personal non-negotiable to treat those we meet with patience, kindness, and understanding. We don’t need to witness the sleepless nights of a tired parent, we don’t need to hear the ongoing defiance between a parent and their teen, we don’t need to see the unsigned divorce papers sitting on someone’s kitchen table, we don’t have to be a part of the role reversal between grown kids and their parents, we don’t have to feel the anguish of determining best treatment options. 

The truth is, we can just know everyone has their struggles. We can know everyone is going through something whether they show it or not, whether we know it or not, whether we can see it or not. The truth is, we can determine today how we want to treat people and then we can treat them that way. We can show everyone we meet patience, kindness, and understanding. The truth is, we all deserve it!