I have been thinking about what it means to try to put yourself into someone else’s shoes.
When I see someone who is different from me – for example, a transgender person, or a Muslim person, or politically conservative person orvan “any kind of different” person – I am tempted to look at that person with fear.
I either fight against that person, flee from that person, or am frozen by that person.
But what if I look at that person with empathy?
What if I put myself in that person’s shoes and walk around?
What might happen if I do that?
I carried that question into a small story.
If you asked the boy in the story, “What do you do?” then he would answer, “I’m a farmer.”
But if you asked him, “Who are you?” then he would answer, “I am a boxer.”
He has a gift.
He can see through people’s eyes and feel through their hearts when they hold his hand.
Here he is with his mamí after a boxing match:
He reached out his hand, battered and bruised from the fight, and found his mamí’s hand to hold. He tried to bend his fingers around hers, but they were too stiff and sore to move. She turned her hand around and opened it so he could rest his palm on hers.
He took a slow, deep breath through his mouth into his tired lungs. He couldn’t breathe in through his nose. His opponent had broken it in the second round with a left hook and it was stuffed with packing gauze. “Oh well,” he thought, “I’m just a farm kid and a boxer. My face doesn’t matter. Only my heart and my hands do.”
He breathed out through his swollen, cracked lips and sighed.
Something happened then that would change his life forever.
As he held his mamí’s hand in the simple room beside the boxing ring, her eyes became his eyes, her ears his ears, and her heart his heart.
He saw the world as she saw it, felt the world as she felt it, when she was his age, a 10-year-old girl.
In the vision, she held her papí’s hand and they walked together by a large window of a hotel restaurant on the main street of the town.
Her papí stepped off of the sidewalk, took his threadbare, tattered hat into his hand and held it to his chest.
He bowed his head in silence as the owner of a large sugar plantation passed by and opened the door to the hotel.
The powerful man sat down with his wife and daughter at a table by the glass window looking out onto the street.
The girl appeared to be His mamí’s age.
She was dressed in the most beautiful dress his mamí had ever seen.
She held a silver fork in her right hand, and on the fork was a piece of steak cooked to perfection by the finest chef in the town.
That morning, his mamí had eaten a single corn tortilla and a spoon of refried beans.
That would be the same thing she would eat that evening, for the season was the time between the harvest of the previous year and the harvest of the present year, and her already poor family was now desperately poor and hungry.
For a moment, the girl’s eyes behind the glass met his mamí’s eyes, but she quickly looked away.
His mamí felt the pain of hunger.
It was deep and aching in her empty stomach and moved out as weakness into her arms and legs, moved out as despair into her mind and heart.
A lump formed in her throat.
She closed her eyes and a tear rolled down her cheek and onto the dust of the sidewalk.
Hilcias, her son holding her hand, felt that pain of hunger, felt the emptiness so deeply in his own stomach and heart that a tear formed in his own eye and rolled down his cheek and onto the dust of the floor of the dark, quiet room.
Hilcias knew then, so deeply and clearly, why his mamí worked the fields in bare feet, why she wore the same dress day after day and year after year.
He knew why she took so little of the food she prepared for her family.
She did these things because she never wanted him to be hungry the way she had been hungry as a little niña.
In that moment, he realized how much his mamí loved him.
He realized how much he loved his mamí.
He realized his mamí was beautiful.
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