Continuing the blog series on Teachers’ Day, acknowledging not only the teachers who taught us in school or college, but also the people – our mentors, contacts or friends who taught us so much despite not being our formal teachers. As they say, everyone is a teacher if you’re ready to be the pupil. Here’s the 9th one in the series.

You don’t realise how someone is feeling in a situation until you go through the same thing.

Another learning through a dear friend, though this was a bit of a harsh lesson through experience, which might not have been wished to happen. So, this person was going through a rough patch & while I could empathise much, I couldn’t really be so sensitive about the situation as one who’s suffering it would want. Not something I would know until I had a similar personal experience – because it really isn’t easy to grasp how much the other person is hurting just by talking to them or knowing their story. As time would have it, I went through almost the same kind of rough patch for sometime. Being in the same situation though gave me a friend to seek comfort from, it also made me realise what was intended to be said when that person said “you would not know it till it happens to you”. Truer words weren’t spoken as that. The whole experience not only made me more sensitive to the suffering but also aware of how much some phases affect you emotionally & your thinking. Apart from of course developing that resilience & strength in you to face anything more tougher than that.

And seemingly so, this holds true not only for the not so good parts of life but also the great parts of life. You really wouldn’t understand how great it feels when you launch something until you’ve actually toiled for months and months and got it all together. You really wouldn’t appreciate the amount of hard work which goes into building an organisation until you’ve build one.

As the following quote beautifully summarises:

Imagine reading about the ocean for a long time without ever seeing the ocean. You develop various ideas about it, until one day someone takes you on a boat and drops you right in the middle. The splash will terrify you; excite you; confuse you; disorient you. But, for the most part you will realize that paper is not the same as the real.

So yeah, more than anything, a very deep learning from the whole experience was this – Be sensitive towards everyone. You never know how hard they’re fighting their own faceless battles which you totally may not have any clue of.

The least we can do is be kind. Everything else is a bonus behaviour :)