Knowing is Not Doing

Reading is one of my favorite past times. I love getting lost in a good story and leaving reality for a while. I love expanding my mind with new ideas. I love thinking about how things connect.

Recently my roommate loaned me "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. Amazing. Very well written novel on a tough subject that made me think. A lot.

In her afterword Stockett says there is one line she truly prizes:

Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd though.

This part stuck out to me too, and I like it even better with a little context around it:

I watch Lou Anne slip away in the parking lot, thinking, There is so much you don't know about a person." I wonder if I could've made her days a little bit easier, if I'd tried. If I'd treated her a little nicer. Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.

But Lou Anne, she understood the point of the book before she ever read it. The one who was missing the point this time was me.

The irony, and relation to reality, struck me. A character in a book who went out of her way and risked a lot to prove a point - that people are just people, that we don't know people's stories till we ask - failed to see the application with someone she knew well and had interacted with regularly. How often do I do that? How often do I fall into that same trap?

It is a fact of life - "what we know is not always reflected in what we do" (to borrow the words of David A. Bednar.) But, we can work each day to understand the stories of the people around us a little more. And, we can be honest and brave enough to acknowledge and learn from situations where what we know was not reflected in what we did.