"...Everyone You Meet is Fighting a Hard Battle"

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato wrote those words over 2,300 years ago. An interesting footnote to history may be that Plato had once been a wrestler, but we all know that's not the kind of fight he was talking about.

We read those words and know exactly what is meant. We are familiar with the lay of our private battlefields. We have our strategies, our victories, and our losses. Our scars are usually invisible to everyone other than ourselves. And, we're never quite certain when the battles will rise up again. We only know that they will.

Plato believed there were three levels of of human nature: passion, courage, and thinking. His proposed goal was, through thinking, courage would overcome passion to bring one to a higher level. Later, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, would expand on the idea. Yet, aside from philosophical discussion, aren't these the components of so many of our personal battles? Right vs. wrong, what we want vs. what is best, what must be done vs. the easy way out.

It's all familiar to us. But what we forget is that everyone around us, from the stranger in line in front of us at the post office to our closest friends and family members, are just as vulnerable, just as battle-weary at times.

One of the clearest examples I've seen of this was when my late mother-in-law was in an assisted living facility. The residence was lovely, the employees compassionate. Yet, the battles of the individual residents were less hidden than they are with the rest of us. One woman would work so hard to maintain a conversation, trying to mask her bewilderment at the rush of words that were somehow so difficult to follow now. A man, a veteran from a distant war, struggled to keep his dignity while trying to walk on his own to the dining room, where he'd feed himself with a trembling hand.

It took little effort to exchange a few words with them, to offer them a smile and nod. The challenge is remembering to do that with everyone we encounter. No one deserves less.