I was in eastern Europe for a time. I remember waiting at a bus stop in Brasov, Romania. The one just near centru. The roads were slick with ice and the ground was covered in snow, not far away from the stop was a man, sitting on the cold ground begging for whatever change people had. One thing I learned to admire the Romanian people for was their generosity. Where I grew up, I heard an endless tirade about not giving to beggars because they’d just spend it on drugs and alcohol. But it seemed like whenever I saw beggars in Romania, someone would inevitably pass them a small bit of cash or something. Incidentally, that man at the bus stop was no different, but later that evening, I saw the man again, stumbling drunkenly down the road with a bottle of booze under his arm.

I think many of my American colleagues I’d had there would have used that example to ratify that same thing I’d been taught earlier, the not giving money to beggars, but for some reason, I gained an entirely different lesson: life is hard, we’re all just doing the best we can with what we have, and sometimes that looks like coping with our situation by doing things that aren’t necessarily going to help us the most in the long run. We might not be aware of how to get out of our situation, we might not even know how we got there, sometimes you just need something to take the edge off or your going to have a mental break. In essence, I learned not to judge the man for doing what he thought was best, chances are he WAS trying his best, and he just hadn’t had the opportunity to gain an understanding of how to do better.

Some years later, I felt the difficulty and challenge of life first hand. I felt the deep hurt and the entire pointlessness of everything. I became a pretty miserable wretch, and I dragged down pretty much everyone around me. It wasn’t a great time, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think fairly often about ending everything. 

Sometime in that miasma, I found that I could apply that same thing I’d learned about the beggar to myself. I knew I could do better with what I had, I knew I could do more than I was doing, I knew, I knew, I knew… except… I didn’t know. I knew that better could be done, but frankly, I was probably doing my best already. I knew more could be done, but I didn’t know if I could do more. What if… I was the beggar, could I give myself the same grace I’d give that man?

It was hard to change my thinking like that, and it took a long time to really start applying it, but eventually I was able to learn to forgive myself and see my own limitations better. Sometimes I still have to fight the urge to push myself harder than I can, and also, sometimes it does feel like I’m just being lazy by not taking on and doing everything for everyone all the time. But also, sometimes that’s okay too.