"Oh Crap" has no scale among friends

People often come up to me; friends… and we chat a while. They tell me about having been sick recently, or some other trouble with a child or family member. They talk about how hard things are sometimes. They often qualify their own hard times by mentioning how it doesn’t compare to my own difficult times. Usually through long faces, they appear to feel sorry that they had even mentioned their own circumstances. I always assure them, I was and always am glad my friends share with me.

It makes me sad…. Troubles me really when people don’t feel like they have the right to discuss painful things in their own lives to me.

One thing that this whole mess has taught me is that our problems, no matter what they are, consume us at times. None of us, not one is immune to the pains and genuine horrors of this life, and mine are no more significant than anybody else’s. I mean, when we find ourselves on the “edge of that proverbial bottom less pit”, the nature of that pit, its depth, stealth, navigability, even its level of danger simply doesn’t matter. All that matters; that is where we all find ourselves from time to time. And because of this, no one single bottomless pit is more dangerous than the next.

When facing crisis, I now believe, how we feel about it doesn’t necessarily depend on severity. At times, we all hurt; we all have times of great fear and even horror. There is no interpersonal scale to measure or compare whose crisis is the worst. It simply doesn’t exist to me.

I remember, just three months ago the things that were bothering me, or the crisis’s I was facing. They loomed large in my path; it seemed, I couldn’t find a path through or even around them. To me, at that time, those things were ultimately significant. Now, however, with less than an 8% chance of surviving the next five years (statistically), I look back at those same things from just a few weeks ago, remember how unmanageable those things seemed, and I am dumb-fuzzled how little those same things bother me now.

I have come to the conclusion, even though it seems counter intuitive, there is no relative scale with which to measure the serenity of crisis between persons. No matter who you are, or what you happen to be going through, please know that I believe my troubles do not in any way, trump your own. And given that, burden me when ever you have the need.