Active distress.

No – not me – I’m doing really good. But it seems that active distress in other people has been making a concerted effort to cross my path this week – and I’ve been in the right space to engage with it. I’ve had three encounters in the last two days (all strangers, two in-person and one via email) with individuals in some sort of profound state of upset or having quasi-suicidal impulses, and in each case I feel like I was able to meet the person at their level of need out of empathy rather than charity.

It’s been rather intense – particularly the encounter yesterday which was with a panhandler-hustler who I have spoken to briefly in the past at my bus stop where he comes to sell used tickets to make cash. For some reason, I’ve always liked this guy – he has a really open smile and he reminds me of a friend of mine who killed himself when I was 18 (they are both of the Cree nation, which makes for a bit of a resemblance I guess) – so when I see him I usually give him something – transit tickets or a bit of change or a cigarette, whatever seems appropriate.

Yesterday I saw him coming up the street towards the bus stop, with a grim look on his face – he was looking like he needed to hustle for some money, but just didn’t seem to have it in him to approach anyone. After looking around for a bit, he sat down near me on a planter behind the bus stop and put his head in his hands. We had nodded to each other when he sat down, but he was obviously not in an outgoing state. After a minute or so of watching him so obviously in an extreme state of distress, I went over to him and put my hand on his shoulder and started talking to him about how things were going for him…

It was so simple, really, even though I had trepidations about entering his physical space, once I was in there we could just talk. And he told me about his bad week, and how he got his black eye, and how he was walking around trying to convince himself not to end his own life…. And I told him that I understood all of that perfectly because the world is pretty hard on so many people, and that it was too bad that more people didn’t just reach out to each other on a regular and random basis. So it went on like that.

I missed my bus, so we could keep talking until he had come down a little, until he had decided that the best thing to do was go and find an AA meeting to go to (which I agreed seemed like a good place to go rather than the bar) and then we had a big hug and he went to go get something to eat before going to a meeting where he could get some support – and I got on the next bus, all quivering from his distressed energy…. but also feeling like by reaching outside of myself I had done the right thing, and had managed through a little intervention to shift the space somewhat. That’s pretty powerful.

It’s been an interesting week, and I’m wondering what it is I’m doing to attract this, or if it’s just that late summer is a hard time on people (it is for me!)