One of my favourite authors wrote a book called ‘The five people you meet in heaven’. It’s the story of a man’s journey to heaven and the five people he encounters on the way. These five people had all played a significant part in his life or more to the point, he had played a significant part in theirs. And they tell him their own unique story of how he impacted their lives. I saw something similar in a video recently, of a man who saved hundreds of children’s lives in the early days of the Holocaust. He saw what was happening in Germany and he made a way for 600 children to leave Germany and find homes in the UK where they would be safe. He saved their lives. And then years and years later, his wife, with the help of a TV host, found as many of these people as possible and gathered them all in a room with him. The host of the show asked that whoever had been saved by this man to stand up. And as he turned around, as all these people stood up, he realised just how many lives he had affected, how many generations he had changed.
In normal life we don’t usually get this opportunity, we don’t get to see the numbers of people that we affect. We also rarely get to do heroic things like this man. Most of us won’t save 600 children from certain death but we do get to change the lives of the people we know and love and the people we don’t. I was on the tube today and a woman got on, she seemed really upset, she was crying and had her head in her hands. And I didn’t know what to do. Whether to ask her if she was okay or to leave her be. I looked around the tube but no one else seemed to notice. I was searching for an answer, I searched so long that my stop rolled around, and I had to get off. So I did nothing. But I can’t stop thinking about her, about if I could have helped somehow, or, at the very least if a kind word from a stranger could have eased her suffering a little bit. I think it could have. Even if she didn’t want help, or to be disturbed, even if she had told me to go away, maybe somewhere deep down she would have felt a little less alone. Maybe not today or even tomorrow, but maybe next week she’d have realised that someone cared. Isn’t that what we all want? To feel a little less alone, a little less stressed and overwhelmed. I have had the worst two years of my life, I have never felt so overwhelmed, sad, despairing and desperate, as I have these last few years. But I have also never felt so loved and so cared for in my entire life. It’s a weird thing to be so sad and so grateful all at the same time, to feel so alone and yet so deeply loved in equal measure. But it is the latter that gets us through. In this life we will have trouble, there will be pain but there will also be joy. Not always the joy we want, sometimes it’s laughter through tears or the dark jokes only you and your closest friends understand. But often it is the tiniest little things; the smile as you get your coffee, the person who gives you their seat, the song of a child on the train.
And what I am learning, very slowly, is that we can all be that for other people. We don’t have to save 600 children, but we can change someone’s day with a smile, a kind word. Sometimes, when things get far too hard and life seems just too impossible, I wish I could be invisible, to not feel, to turn it all off. To not exist for a little while, to find some peace. I wonder what the point is, when this world is so dark and people are so cruel. But then I remember the woman on the train, and how I could have helped her. I think about all the people I do help, not because I am extra special, but because we are all unique, because we all have the power to change the world around us, to change the lives of the people around us, by being a little kinder, a little braver maybe. By reaching out instead of turning in. I try now to find peace in connection, to find beauty in the ugly, to be light in the dark. I am realising, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that life may be hard and disappearing seems easy but showing up reaps far greater rewards. Even if showing up simply means looking up a little more often, and opening up a tiny bit more.
Now I like to think that all the people I will meet in heaven will have a smile for me, because one day I had a smile for them, and if nothing else, it helped them to feel a little less alone and helped me, to feel a little less afraid.
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