“I am because we are.”
I heard those words for the first time yesterday and the world made sense. My existence made sense.
The quote is an African Ubuntu, or philosophy. It means we are dependent on one another; that we need to help one another.
This a philosophy women should really live by. We all have struggles in life, but instead of realizing that we can only get through together, we go through it alone. We push someone when they are down and they have to take all their burdens alone.
Of course, we’re not all the same. Your struggles are different from mine. My struggles are different from yours. But, at the risk of sounding like an inspirational song, we need to realize that we can go so much further in our own personal growth if we lend one another a helping hand.
Even the smallest thing can help a woman’s day become brighter or, unfortunately, darker.
I was walking out of my apartment complex the other day and I passed a young woman who was walking in. I smiled at her (we are neighbors, after all), but she looked me up and down, rolled her eyes and kept walking.
Some of us cannot even give someone something as small as a smile. We’ve known since elementary school that it’s much easier to smile than frown, but we hold our smiles hostage. We lock up our friendly waves, our compliments and our “how d’ya do’s?” in a box labeled “Do not open under any circumstances.”
We frequently take things out of our box of unkind gestures that can ruin a person’s self-esteem. We take out the insults, sometimes given in a joking voice but they are insults, nonetheless. We take out our cattiness, yelling at one another over something stupid (like a guy). We whisper about one another, we betray friends and we will even turn our backs on family.
We can do all of those hurtful things, but we can’t take out something as easy as a smile to brighten someone’s day a little; to let someone know they are not alone.
That look I received from my neighbor changed my whole day. It put these thoughts on my mind and it changed the way I reacted to my neighbors.
When I returned to my apartment this morning and I passed by a girl leaving, I didn’t smile at her. Would she roll her eyes at me, too? Would she look at me the way the woman did the other day?
But right before we crossed paths, she smiled at me. That small gesture restored some of my faith in people. It’s crazy how something so small, caused such a stir in my life. You never know how much something as small as a smile can do.
I smiled back.
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