Atticus’ Words About Really Knowing Another Person

The Split Second-In Consideration of Others in These Trying Times

I am about to make a great pitch again to land a literary agent for my unpublished book The Split Second:  In Consideration of Others or Look Up from the Phone and How to Deal with Rudeness in Others; it sure is not easy to do. I am aware that agents’ offices have many manuscripts piled up in them.

In the last blog post, I discussed the concept of “walking in one’s shoes.” That expression is used much in society. Since most of us read Harper Lee’s valuable book, To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, usually in the tenth grade, we remember Atticus Finch discussing how “you never really know another person until you have put on his/her shoes and walked around in them for a while” (I have paraphrased the actual quotation). I tell people “I only walk in my own shoes.”  However, the point is that it is so very wrong to assume what a person is thinking or feeling at a given moment or in general throughout his/her life. I have known people who have said, “All I need to do is look into a person’s eyes to know what he/she is thinking.”  I must think unless a person has psychic capabilities which I do not, he/she cannot really know what another person is experiencing. There may be much “baggage” that the other person is “carrying” of which he/she would never be aware. The Split Second suggests that all of us need to take a step back and not assume what another person is experiencing. Life could be a lot worse than we can ever know for that person.

This one was very short for me, right folks?