I was Rude and I’m Very Sorry

The other day, I was entering a local bank and a man held the door open for me. I just passed through and I didn’t thank him which was rude of me. He said, “Your welcome” in a sarcastic tone and walked off. In my defense, while turning into the bank parking lot, I was almost t-boned by an oncoming car and I was quite shaken by the near miss. In retrospect, I should have stayed in my car and worked on calming myself down before charging out of the car which is what I did instead.

This incident got me thinking. To this man, I was a rude woman who didn’t appreciate that he had held the door open for her. In our lifetimes, we all have had encounters with people when we considered them extremely rude.

But what if that person wasn’t just being rude? What if something else was going on in his or her that over shadowed whatever had just occurred?

For example, Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, tells a story about an incident while riding the subway one day. There were four children running around disturbing people. He spoke to the father about the children running wild and needing to quiet down. The father looked sadly at Steven and said, “We just left the hospital. My wife died. Their mother just died.”  Steven, with this new understanding, went into helpful mode and started gathering the children and telling them stories.

For the strangers that we mingle with daily while shopping, driving or standing in the line at the DMV, we don’t know what is happening in their lives. They could have just learned that they had: cancer; lost their job of many years; received divorce papers that morning. Who knows?

There are many rude people out in the world. We hear about those types in the news daily. What made them that way, we don’t know. Were they bullied as children? Abused by a family member? Given the world on a silver platter? What I do know is there are a lot of people carrying heavy burdens that come across as rude when they might have a good reason.

The moral of this story, for me at least, is that I hope the next time that I’m in a situation in which I become annoyed at someone’s behavior, I consider that something might be happening in their lives that is overriding their interaction with me, before I make a harsh opinion of their behavior. Maybe, if we were a little more understanding of others, our world would be a better place to live in.

Until the next time…