The Weight
You Leave With

There are people you can spend an hour with and walk away feeling better, even though nothing in your life has changed.

Maybe you had coffee. Maybe you stood beside a car in a parking lot, talking longer than either of you intended. No great problem was solved, and no remarkable wisdom was exchanged. The doctor’s appointment is still Thursday. The argument you had that morning is still waiting at home. And yet, walking across the parking lot afterward, things don’t seem quite as heavy.

I have known a few people like that.

They aren’t necessarily the smartest people in the room, and usually they aren’t trying to be. One of the things you notice about them is that they don’t seem particularly anxious to give you an answer at all.

They listen.

That sounds simple until you pay attention to how rarely we actually do it. Most of us listen while preparing our reply. Someone tells us about a problem, and we start building the solution before they have finished describing it. Someone tells us they are hurting, and because we care about them, we immediately begin looking for a way to make the hurting stop.

I have done both more times than I could count.

After nearly fifty years of selling things to people, working with people and simply living among them, you would think I might have learned sooner that not every problem set in front of me was an invitation to solve it.

Sometimes the person across from you just needs somewhere to put the weight down for an hour.

The people who understand that seem to do certain small things almost without thinking. They remember the name you mentioned the last time you talked, and they ask about your son or the job interview you were worried about. They don’t answer your trouble with something worse that happened to them. They can sit through a few seconds of silence without rushing to fill it.

They make room.

That may be the best way I know to describe it.

There are other people who have the opposite effect, and I suspect all of us know a few. They aren’t cruel. They may be perfectly decent, and some probably believe they are being helpful.

But somehow every conversation comes back to them.

Tell them about something difficult, and they explain what you should have done. Tell them about something good, and they have done something better. Before long, you begin editing yourself, leaving things out because explaining them seems like more work than carrying them.

An hour later, you walk away tired.

Nothing terrible happened.

They simply added something to the load.

I wish I could say I have always been the first kind of person. I haven’t.

There have been conversations when someone was still talking and I was already halfway to the door in my mind, and times when somebody needed another five minutes and I was looking at the clock. I have offered advice nobody asked for, and more than a few opinions that would have been better left where I found them.

Age doesn’t cure that, and experience can make it worse, because the longer we live, the more convinced we become that we have seen this problem before.

Maybe we have.

But we haven’t been this person before.

Their trouble may resemble something we went through twenty years ago, but what became a lesson in our life may still be an open wound in theirs.

Words have weight, too.

There is a sentence I have carried for most of my life, although I couldn’t describe the man who gave it to me. I think it was one of my football coaches. I couldn’t tell you where we were standing or what happened that day. His face is gone from my memory. His words aren’t.

“Not every lion that chased a zebra caught it. But every lion that ever caught a zebra chased it.”

I was young when I heard that. I doubt the man who said it thought he was handing me anything important. It may have been something he had heard somewhere else. Maybe he said it to a whole group of us and never thought about it again.

I did.

Those words have followed me through a lot of years. They have meant different things at different times, but the heart of them never changed. Chasing doesn’t guarantee that you will catch anything. You can work hard, take the chance, make the call, get back up and still lose. Life provides plenty of evidence for that.

But standing still settles the question before you begin.

I don’t remember the man’s face.

I remember what he said.

There is something worth considering in that. We don’t always get to decide which of our words another person keeps. The sentence we think is important may disappear before supper. Something we say almost in passing may still be riding around in somebody’s head fifty years later.

I know. I’ve been carrying one.

We spend a good deal of time thinking about what we give people: presents at Christmas, a check when somebody is short, advice when they ask for it. Those things matter. But I wonder if some of the most important things we give one another never get wrapped, deposited or even mentioned—patience, perhaps, or letting someone else have the middle of the conversation without competing for it.

We know so little about what other people are carrying. The cashier who seems distracted may have spent the night beside a hospital bed. The old friend who calls and talks longer than usual may simply not want to be alone yet. Most of the time, we never find out.

We meet people in the middle of their stories, and we don’t know what will be waiting when they get home.

Maybe that is why small kindnesses stay with us so long. I can remember people from decades ago who did something for me that they almost certainly forgot before the day was over. A hand on a shoulder. Somebody staying when they could have left. Someone listening without telling me what I ought to do next.

It wasn’t much, and it came at exactly the right time. They had no way of knowing that.

Not long ago, I got a phone call from a man I had worked with years before. We hadn’t talked in a long time, and I assumed he wanted something, the way you do when an old name turns up on the phone.

He didn’t.

He said he just wanted to thank me for helping him quit smoking.

I didn’t remember helping him. When he explained, a little of it came back. Somewhere along the way, in passing, I had told him about my own trouble when I quit—how hard it had been and what finally got me through it. I couldn’t have told you where we were standing or what else we talked about that day. It was one comment among thousands, and I had probably forgotten it before I got home.

He hadn’t.

He carried it around until he was ready for it, and then he quit. He told me he credits that conversation for the years he has had with his wife and daughter since.

I sat there a while after we hung up.

Maybe that old football coach and I have more in common than I realized. He said something to a young man and went on with his day. Decades later, that young man said something to another man and did the same thing. Neither of us knew we had said anything that would last.

That bothers me a little when I think about it. Because if the good words can last, I suppose the careless ones can, too.

Most of us can name one or two people who did something like that for us. If we are fortunate, we can name several. The harder question is whether anyone would put our name on their list, simply because things felt a little lighter after we had been there.

Most of them, I suspect, will never call to tell us.

Few of us will ever cure anybody of anything. We can’t save every marriage or carry somebody else’s grief home with us, and maybe we aren’t supposed to. But every day, people pass through our lives carrying things we cannot see, and for a few minutes, or an hour, we get to make that load heavier or lighter.

We may not be able to take it from them.

Once in a while, it may be enough to give them someplace to set it down, so that when they pick it up again and walk back across the parking lot, it weighs a little less.