“If you saw a man in the middle of the night, looking in the windows of cars in the parking lot of the Ramada Inn. Would you think he was trying to get his head cleared? Would you think he was trying to get ready for a day when trouble would come to him? Would you think his girlfriend was leaving him? Would you think he had a daughter? Would you think he was anybody like you?”
- Rock Springs, by Richard Ford
You’re in a hotel, you look out the window and see a lone man in the parking lot peering into the car windows. Are you anything like him?
You may think not. After all, he is probably going to break into and steal one of those cars, and of course you are not a criminal yourself, and neither do you associate with them. (Unless you’re a pirate, arrr.)
Unfortunately, it’s also statistically impossible for you to not have anything in common with that other person. For one, you’re both human. More specifically, you’re both homo sapiens. Which means you have about as much in common as one chihuahua named Sparky and another chihuahua named Aluishious. But it’s also quite likely that you have more in common than just your species.
Those who know me know it takes a lot to make me angry, and I find it impossible to stay mad at anyone for any length of time. I mean, you’d have to really piss me off to make me not like you. And in truth it’s because we’re both humans, and in some way or another I sympathize with you.
It would seem the key to sympathizing another person is to find something you have in common, and choose to dwell on that instead of your differences. Take that “criminal” looking in the car windows. Think about his back story: What’s he really doing there? How and why did your paths happen to meet? Does he have a family? Where are they? Everybody’s born with a family of some sort. Did his finally give up on him?
I wonder the same thing about everybody, actually. How do people get to be the way they are today? It’s the kind of obsession that would make for a good stalker or a good CIA agent (another commonality). It’s a good obsession to get into though, since if you can get inside the mind of others it tends to be much easier to forgive them when they do stupid things. And that makes you a much more tolerable person.
