On Being Misunderstood

In the pressures and complexities of life there is much misunderstanding, and often we think wrong things about the other people, with suspicion, mistrust, imagining or magnifying offenses, misunderstanding motives, and so live with resentment, when a little communication, a little common sense, a little light, could remove misunderstanding. But we can’t understand if we close our hearts, our lives, too tightly.

Longfellow left these searching lines: “How can I tell the signals and the sings By which one heart another heart divines? /How can I tell the many thousand ways /By which it keeps the secret it betrays?”

There comes to all of us, at times, a feeling of being misunderstood, lonely and alone, sometimes even feeling in some ways separated from those we live and work with. And we wonder why they don’t understand us, why they don’t understand our moods and fears and feelings. But others also have their problems, their sorrows, their frustrations, their feelings. But others also have their problems, their sorrows, their frustrations, their feelings of failure; others in some ways, wage inside themselves the self-same battles that we wage. “If we could read the secret history [even] of our enemies,” said Longfellow, “we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

Every person has his problems. Every person sometimes misunderstands, and is misunderstood. Every person has moments of loneliness, discouragement, of unsupported suspicion. All of us have vanities, fears, and sensitivities. We all have weight enough to carry around in this world. And we all could five and take a little kindness and compassion, with charity, forgiveness, and willingness to understand and lift life’s burdens from others and ourselves:

O God, that men would see a little clearer,

Or judge less harshly where they cannot see!

O God, that men would draw a little nearer

To one another! They’d be nearer Thee…