Other People Are Not The Enemy

Inside Nat's Notebook - Real Reflections for Real Change

Have you ever noticed how one difficult conversation can quietly follow you around for the rest of the day, sometimes longer?

Someone says something you weren't expecting. An email lands that feels a little sharper than it needed to be. A driver pulls out in front of you. A colleague seems impatient. A family member makes a comment over lunch and that comment is still holding a full debate with you several hours later.

Nothing extraordinary has happened. Yet somehow your shoulders are a little tighter, your jaw has joined in, and here you are replaying the whole thing in your mind, thinking about what they said, what they meant and what you really wish you'd said back. Usually something devastatingly brilliant that only occurred to you three hours later, am I right?

Other people have an extraordinary ability to affect how we feel.

And wouldn't life be considerably easier if everyone would simply behave themselves?

If people were kinder. More thoughtful. Less impatient. If they replied when they said they would, understood what you meant the first time and somehow knew exactly which subjects were best avoided when you're already having one of those days.

It sounds rather lovely in that world, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, it seems other humans have missed the memo.

People misunderstand you. They have bad days. They become impatient. They interrupt, disappoint, forget things and occasionally say exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.

And sometimes the person doing all of that is YOU. Annoying, I know!

That's part of this strange, messy business of being human.

The trouble is, your body doesn't wait around while your mind decides whether something is worth getting upset about. It is constantly noticing the people around you. A change in someone's voice. A look on their face. A silence that feels different somehow. The email that begins with an unexpected "Can we talk?"

Before you've consciously made sense of any of it, something inside you may already have shifted. Your stomach tightens. Your breathing changes. You start preparing an explanation. You want to defend yourself, fix things, keep the peace or get as far away from the conversation as possible.

Your body is doing exactly what we talked about last week; catch up here if you missed it. It is responding to what it believes is happening around you.

And this is where things become interesting. Because the person standing opposite you has a body doing exactly the same thing. They have their own history, their own pressures, their own fears, their own sleepless nights and their own collection of things you know absolutely nothing about. They are meeting this moment through everything their life has taught them too.

Which makes me wonder how many arguments begin with two people trying to protect themselves at exactly the same time.

One becomes sharp. The other becomes defensive. One pulls away. The other pushes harder. Before long, neither person is really responding to what is happening anymore. They're responding to what their mind and body believe it means.

Understanding that doesn't make unkind behaviour okay. There are people whose behaviour needs challenging. You know the ones, right?  Relationships need boundaries. You have a right to decide not to continue a conversation. Compassion should never require you to abandon yourself in order to understand somebody else. Please let me be VERY clear about that.

But there is an enormous difference between understanding behaviour and accepting behaviour.

You can wonder what might be happening underneath someone's impatience and still decide you won't be spoken to that way. You can understand that someone is struggling and still say no. You can love somebody enormously and recognise that something between you needs to change.

In fact, sometimes the kindest thing you can do is both.

We're very quick to decide what someone's behaviour tells us about who they are. Rude. Difficult. Selfish. Thoughtless. Hard work. We're much less practised at wondering what might be sitting underneath what we can see.

The woman who snaps at the checkout may simply be rude. She may also have spent the night beside someone she loves in hospital. Your colleague's short reply may be about you. Or it may have arrived after three hours of sleep, a row at home and a morning spent trying desperately to hold everything together.

You don't know. And neither do I.

That's the point.

You see the behaviour. You rarely see the life underneath it.

Burnout taught me this in a way I don't think I could ever unlearn. People would tell me how well I looked at times when simply getting through the day was taking everything I had. From the outside, they saw one thing. Inside, I was living something completely different. It made me much slower to assume I know what another person is carrying. Not because everyone deserves unlimited access to your patience. Not because you need to explain away behaviour that hurts you. Simply because there is often more to a human being than the moment in which you happen to meet them.

And that is why kindness has become so important to me. Not kindness as being nice all the time. Not kindness that smiles while quietly seething underneath. And certainly not kindness that asks you to make yourself smaller so somebody else can feel comfortable.

Real kindness includes you too.

🧡 Sometimes kindness says, "I can see you're struggling."

🧡 Sometimes it says, "I love you, and this isn't okay."

🧡 Sometimes it says nothing at all and simply allows you to walk away without needing to turn another human being into the villain of the story.

Over the past few weeks, we've looked at life, your thoughts and your body, and each time we've questioned the same instinct: the instinct to decide that something has gone wrong and needs to be fought.

Now we arrive at other people.

Because life will continue to be life. Your mind will continue to think. Your body will continue to communicate. And other people will continue to be gloriously, frustratingly, imperfectly human.

Because that IS life. And that is being human.

You see, I don't believe the answer is to get everyone under control. Good luck with that anyway. I believe it is about becoming more aware of how you meet people, yourself and life.

It is about noticing what happens inside you. Getting curious before rushing to judgement. Knowing when kindness is needed and when kindness needs a boundary. Remembering that the person opposite you has an inner world every bit as complicated as your own.

You won't get it right every time. Neither will they.

But you might begin to move through the world with a little less defence and a little more understanding. A little less certainty about what everybody else is doing wrong and a little more curiosity about what is actually happening.

You see, that's the thread that has been running through this whole series.

Life is not the enemy.

Your thoughts are not the enemy.

Your body is not the enemy.

Other people are not the enemy.

They're all part of this extraordinary, complicated experience of being human. And maybe life begins to feel a little different when you stop fighting it and start learning how to meet it.

LoveLove

Nat x

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