When You Think You Know Someone's Hand - Coffee talks

On the quiet arrogance of deciding whose life is easier than yours

I like to consider myself an open-minded person. Someone seriously devoted to self-development, through coaching, certificates, reading, even astrology, for God’s sake. And yet, turns out I am just human. And we humans have this stubborn habit of thinking we’ve got things figured out.

When I say figured out, I don’t mean my life, that’s very much a work in progress. I mean something heavier. The way I see things. My opinions on life, on purpose, on all those questions that don’t have clean answers.

One of the gifts of my life is being surrounded by friends who are interested in the same things. People I can go deep with. People who, every now and then, will stop me mid-sentence and correct me.

Today, over coffee, I was sharing my take on how some of us simply get better cards in this lifetime. The normal childhood. The partner who gets you. Kids when you wanted them. A job you actually chose. Healthy parents. The things that matter. And I was commenting, casually, how nice it must be to be them.

That’s when one of my friends stopped me.

On paper, she has everything I just described. By my own definition, she drew a good hand. But she looked at me and made it clear, the view from where she’s standing looks nothing like what I see from the outside.

She’s a fighter. I call her Don Quixote, because she seems to be in constant battle with a system that fails us every single day. She speaks up for what’s right, even when that’s not exactly celebrated around here. And it’s not something she can switch off. Fairness matters to her. Justice matters to her. And we live in a world that is running short on both.

So is her life easy? She wouldn’t say so.

And that made me think, who am I to decide what’s easy and what isn’t? Who says the person going through a divorce, or losing a job, or navigating whatever challenge life threw at them, is unhappy? Maybe they move through it lightly. Maybe for them, these are just experiences. Part of the process. Part of what this lifetime is supposed to feel like.

I know the map is not the territory. I’ve known that for years.

Knowing it, apparently, didn’t stop me from drawing someone else’s map for them.

It should have. People have their own relationship with their struggles, one that took them years to build. When we minimize that, even with the best intentions, we’re not being thoughtful. We’re just being careless with something that matters to them. And instead of building bridges we are destroying them.

I’ll try to do better with that.

Love,

Diana