Everyone Has a Story

The past few weeks have been a constant stream of something going on, something out of my ordinary routine of daily life.  Work has been crazy, project deadline after project deadline looming on the horizon.  My grandmother was in the hospital and went through a surgery for kidney cancer.  Family has been in town for that and I was really sick for a week throughout all of this.  I'm in that limbo right now where I'm not back on my normal schedule, not quite back to normal life but getting there with each passing day.

While everything is working itself out, work is slowing down again, my grandma is going to be fine and she's healing, family is slowly returning home and I'm well again, these past few weeks have tested me.  I feel drained.  I feel overwhelmed and ready for some moments to just think about all that's going on in my life.  

Through all of this, I've come home many nights mentally and physically exhausted and overwhelmed with emotions.  But through it all, it also brought up many thoughts, many things that in the routine of normalcy don't always come up.  I got to thinking about people, about how quickly someone can be taken away, about how quickly our lives can change.  And in those moments when I've been overwhelmed and exhausted and had the urge to snap at that barista who takes forever with your coffee or the driver going 25 miles an hour on the freeway in front of you, I've found myself thinking a lot more lately about those people and what they're going through too.

Long story short, we're all going through things.  We all have people we love, we all have lost things and we've all experienced heart ache.  We've all had our good days and our bad days.  We're all wandering through this life just trying to take it day by day.  We're all in this together, for good or for bad, and we're all interconnected. 

Everyone has a story, everyone has someone they are worried about, everyone has someone they love and someone who loves them.  Everyone has gone through something that has changed them.  And just like me, everyone is muddling through the constant stream of stresses that life brings.

So as I'm beginning to return to some normalcy, I'm making it a priority to move forward looking a little further into those around me, to see what their story is, to see what they have gone through to change them.  Because maybe that barista is going through a hard time, maybe that slow driver has just experienced loss.  Maybe if we gave each other a little bit more the time of day, maybe if we looked a little deeper into their stories, we'd be able to live our own stories better too.

Source: bqfy.info via Casey on Pinterest