Thursday
April 25, 2024 
Today, I learned something new … not easy at my age. Today, a 2-month-old baby taught me a treasured lesson to last a lifetime.
When any of us learns something we thought we already knew it’s an enlightening, perhaps confusing, moment. We wonder how we could have gone so long understanding something we didn’t really know. It’s what most of us would call a revelation. Revelations are always a good thing, whether or not we’re glad we had them.
Today, I heard a baby cry. Not a revelation, right? We’ve all heard babies cry, but this cry was different. When we hear babies cry, we hear their needs as they relate to us. We wonder, how we can help, what they need, and what does our experience and our role in relation to the cries tell us we can or must do. Our knee-jerk response is about our part to play.
Today, this little fellow, after minor out-patient surgery, was crying in a whole new light, at least, new for me. Not crying to elicit the responses he’s accustomed to, I heard him crying for himself … meaning he was crying on his own behalf in defense of himself, as a person. It was out of the ordinary. It was advocation and about what he was feeling - not food, cold, exhaustion, or help. This baby was just saying, “I am here. I am crying for me.”
It sounds odd because it’s such an out-of-body, complex observation, but it’s a huge and wonderful revelation. Suddenly, I was inside his world, hearing him as a person, on his own, not requesting aid but defiantly advocating for himself. It was far more than a stimulant for some other person’s response. It was a statement of individuality and existence, and it was splendid.
This awareness seemed to open a door and shed a new light on something that has been in the room all the while, in all our lives, for everyone, and is too often missed … possibly because it is so large.
We tend to deal with all life as it affects us, as we serve it, or need to respond to some stimulus. We also see our own needs from the world, but even the greatest of empaths may have difficulty seeing the emotions of others from their side. We may understand, but we have to work to understand that they’re feeling it the way they do. We may live our life to help others yet never really hear them. We hear them in the sound wave sense but not in the sense of their cries being visceral to them, or hear them advocating for themselves.
This is what this infant’s shrill defense taught me for the first time today. I felt an awareness in the third person such as I’d never felt before. These are very fine lines, for sure. They’re so fine, in fact, that we may doubt their existence but they are there, and we all need to displace ourselves in order to gain the insight that crossing these fine lines will teach us. It’s a short trek yet a nearly impossible walk. It’s quite stunning to be removed from self-awareness, which is our very existence since birth, and be dropped into another person’s place.
A few months ago, the Herald carried a letter from a young black female. She’s a lifelong citizen of our town who spoke about the nonchalant remarks black people hear often which remind them that they are black; it was very moving. The journey through another person’s eyes, really thinking about it from the other side, however momentary, is a bit unnerving.
We all travel our lives being no one but ourselves and seeing life, and living life, as ourselves; there’s little else we can do, even with effort. We want to be as aware as possible, but one moment listening to the way they live it, right from the source, is quite unique.
We may go through life thinking we already know or are understanding, in a hopeful and gratuitous state of candlelight, unless someone’s cries bring us into the sun.
It’s easy to cry for ourselves. For some people, it’s easy to cry for others, but just as empathy surpasses sympathy, there must be something that surpasses empathy – something that puts us inside another person’s world, head, or heart, because the most difficult tears to understand are those which are cried by others, for themselves … as people.
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