The World Doesn't Need More Successful People

My mother-in-law asks where her husband is. I tell her. Two minutes later, she asks again. I tell her again. By the twentieth time that hour, I’ve stopped counting.

She has no short-term memory. Everything else is intact — her humor, her opinions, her sharpness about the people around her. Just not the last two minutes. So her husband gets admitted to the hospital and it happens to her fresh, over and over, all day, every day. Sometimes she takes it in with something like understanding. Sometimes it’s anger — at us, for things that aren’t true, for a world that keeps taking her husband away without warning.

I’m with her nearly around the clock now, with breaks now and then. I haven’t handled all of it well. There have been outbursts on my part when the accusations start. I’m trying to get better at just explaining, again, patiently, what’s happening. My husband and I are looking for a place where she’ll be happier. That’s its own story.

But this one is about what I keep bumping into while I sit with her: how much of my life I spend managing what people think of me instead of just being with them.

I read a line recently, from Simplify Magazine’s kindness issue.

The world doesn’t need more successful people, or busy people, or accomplished people. It needs more compassionate people.

It stopped me. Because when I interact with people, how much of it is actually compassion? How much is evaluation — reading them, judging them, wondering what they think of me — dressed up as connection?

I used to call it shyness. Now I think it’s something narrower. Sometimes I’m quiet because the topic doesn’t interest me, or it’s over my head, or I’ve simply chosen not to speak. That’s not the same thing. Being guarded is the signal. If I go quiet because I’m guarded about being exposed, I’m protecting myself. If I go quiet and I’m not guarded, I just didn’t have anything to add.

The protective kind is the one I want out of.

If compassion were actually my focus — not politeness, not performance, but compassion — I don’t think I’d have room left to worry what anyone thought of me. I could tell a story from my own life and not brace for judgment on the way in. I might still get hurt. That was never the point. Being compassionate was.

My husband is better at this than I am. We’ll be out walking and he’ll stop and talk to a stranger — really talk, not just trade pleasantries and move on. I notice the people who seem to invite an exchange. I might exchange pleasantries with them, but that’s it. And then I keep walking. I want to learn what he already knows: that stopping to engage is the compassionate act, not the interruption of one.

With friends I do better. I’m a listener by nature. There was a running joke in a group I used to belong to — that I barely talked, but when I did, everyone leaned in, because they’d learned it was worth hearing.

I don’t know yet how to bring that same instinct to strangers, or to a woman who asks me the same question for the twentieth time in an hour. But I know what compassion looks like right now. It looks like answering her gently the twentieth time, the same as the first.