Their Season

You have lived through hard things. That does not mean you understand someone else’s struggles.

Maybe your season looked like theirs once. Same shape, same weight, same name. That is where most people stop thinking.

But the person going through it now is not you. Their ground is not yours. Their ground is harder, or softer, or built on something you never had to stand on. You cannot see the foundation from across the room.

The season you survived prepared you for your next season. It did not make you an expert on theirs.

Hold what you know loosely.

A person in grief does not need your timeline. A person in failure does not need your before-and-after. A person whose marriage is breaking does not need your unsolicited diagnosis built from a different marriage in a different decade.

They need you to sit with them. They need to know you do not think less of them for being where they are. They need the wisdom you gained held out like an open hand, not pressed onto them like a stamp.

Compassion is not weakness. It is the discipline of remembering that your story is not the only story.

Apply the wisdom you earned. Share the lessons when asked. Judge softly. Judge slowly. Judge mostly your own season, and only after you have walked all the way through it.

Sit with them in theirs.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” — Marcus Aurelius