This incident happened with Stephen Covey - the author of one of the most popular books on personal development - "7 Habits of Highly Effective People." Let's tell it in the first person.
One Sunday morning in the New York subway, I experienced a real upheaval in my mind. The passengers sat quietly in their seats - someone was reading a newspaper, someone was thinking about something of their own, someone, closing their eyes, was resting. Everything around was quiet and calm.
Suddenly a man with children entered the carriage. The children were shouting so loudly, so disgraceful, that the atmosphere in the carriage immediately changed. The man sat down on the seat next to me and closed his eyes, clearly not paying attention to what was happening around.
Children screamed, rushed back and forth, threw themselves with something, and did not give rest to the passengers at all. It was outrageous. However, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
I felt irritated. It was hard to believe that you can be so insensitive as to allow your children to bully, and not react to it in any way, pretending that nothing is happening.
It was quite obvious that all the passengers in the carriage experienced the same irritation. In short, in the end I turned to this man and said, as it seemed to me, unusually calmly and restrained:
“Sir, listen, your children are bothering so many people! Could you please calm them down?
The man looked at me as if he had just woken up from a dream and did not understand what was happening, and quietly said:
- Oh, yes, you are right! Probably something needs to be done ... We have just come from the hospital where their mother died an hour ago. My thoughts are confused, and, probably, they are also not themselves after all this.
Can you imagine how I felt at this moment? My thinking turned upside down. Suddenly I saw everything in a completely different light, completely different from the one that was a minute ago.
Of course, I instantly began to think differently, feel differently, behave differently. The irritation was gone. Now there was no need to control my attitude towards this person or my behavior: my heart was filled with deep compassion. The words spontaneously escaped me:
- Your wife just passed away? Oh, sorry! How did this happen? Is there anything I can do to help?
Everything changed in an instant.
