Did I mean nothing to you?

I’ve been thinking recently about the moments between people which were meaningful to one person but not the other.

Sometimes it's in those small things that arrive at just the right time, like I remember this one time when someone held out a chair for me at a meeting and smiled when I felt nervous and like I didn’t belong.

When I’m feeling lost just the memory of these moments can hand me back my humanity. But I bet they don’t know that.

What prompted this unfinished musing though, was actually the somewhat sad and lonely realisation that there were times of deep meaningfulness to me in my friendships, family and romantic relationships that were intimate and healing to me but I subsequently realised were experienced differently or even dismissed on the other side.

Thing is, I've been on that other side - where people have said to me 'that thing you said changed me' and I have thought, 'god I nearly didn't say that, it was a throwaway' or when they mentioned our exchange, I barely remembered. Then when I did, wanted to say ‘it was nothing, I’d do it for anyone.’

The place I have landed is that it's really easy to dismiss your own impact. Especially on the days where you feel at affect of some aspects of your life or internal experience. It's easy to be so preoccupied and frustrated with ‘I can't’, you forget what you can do.

It's easy to dismiss your own impact too because it's intimate. To share a moment of meaning, to acknowledge what happened in the space between or even for someone else, requires a willingness to be with someone in their experience. It is is intimate and many of us have a wounding there.

Acknowledging your positive impact also means acknowledging your own inherent goodness too. A goodness so inherent it can be unconscious or accidental.

And maybe that's the nub of it, in one way or another. That challenges a lot of our beliefs. We aren't brought up in a culture that teaches us to recognise our own goodness, or the power of our own goodness in a loving and compassionate way, but rather that we are inherently wrong and need to do good things to make up for that. Or that we are going to have to fight to make a difference and no one will hear us.

We aren’t taught there's a way to make impact that quietly ripples through someone's consciousness and changes their behaviour and way of being from then on.

Here's to recognising your own impact in way that expands your heart