I got my first office job back when I was 19 years old and in that company I met a very wise woman who taught me a valuable lesson on human interaction. She used to say that it really does not matter for how long you interact with someone, what is important is the depth of the connection that you have with them. Sometimes we meet people briefly but they stay in our minds for the rest of our lives; while with other people it takes years of interactions for them to grow on us. It is as if with some people their role in the movie of your life was to show up in just one scene, say just a few lines but somehow affect the rest of the plot. And if it's in a negative way they don't get a second chance to amend their contribution to your story. They only get one chance to be a hero or a villain.
The thing about the other people, those who appear regularly in your story, is that they have more time to develop the character that they are performing. They can start as heroes and become villains later on, or the other way around... or even shift continuously from one role to the other if they stay in your story long enough. While people who appear briefly in your movie get very limited time to change status. And then there is us, and of course we are always the hero in our own story. But what happens with heroes is that they can be the good person in your movie but they might be the villain in someone else's. It's all a matter of perspective.
My aim has always been to be one of the heroes, not only in my movie, but in the movie of every person that I interact with. I always try to have positive interactions with others and not only with the people that are close to me, but also with those people that I get to meet only for a few minutes or a few hours or a few days. Because I sincerely want other people to feel good around me and to remember me as the person who made them feel their best, no matter how brief the encounter was. Sadly, it can't happen all the time. Sometimes I am the villain. I don't think that I ever do it on purpose, and sometimes when it happens I am not even aware of it, but if I find out I do my best to amend my misbehavior. One thing is for sure, I never stop trying to be the best person that I can be.
Some people might like us, others might not, and that is just life. But we should never stop trying to be the best version of ourselves. The world is in need of good people now more than ever.
Photo credit: behind the scenes by Andrew Clark.
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