There is a battle going on right under our noses. The warriors are not the biggest or the strongest. They are not what any of us expect in a psychological fight that will change the course of the world. In fact, most people have no clue that the battle is being waged.
Picture the scene… There is a girl. She is eleven and is running for all she’s worth. It is, after all, what she is expected to do. Yes, she’s even trained for it. There is another eleven year old behind her, quickly overtaking her. The heat is fantastic in the open field, registering more than 95 degrees. They’ve already been running for over a mile without stopping. The girl in front blacks out and falls forward into a metal post that grazes her side as she falls. The girl behind her stops in her tracks, seized for a split second in indecision. People all around her are yelling indecipherable things in her general direction. It’s her versus her.
The decision is made. The girl behind kneels to help the girl who passed out. The words being yelled begin to become coherent. “Leave her!” “Someone will get her!” “What are you doing? RUN!” The kneeling girl ignores them. She has to know that the girl will be okay. Rough hands pick her up from where she knelt, pushing her away. She digs in her heels and refuses to move. The yelling intensifies. Other people have reached the fallen girl. “Run, girl! She’s not on your team!”
“No.” The girl says, “I want to know that she’s okay.” “She’ll be fine, now RUN!” Finally, the girl turns and begins again to run. She is very far behind the other runners now. Still troubled and looking back until she can no longer see the scene, the girl runs. Most of the cheering crowd has disbursed around the finish line as she crossed it in 111th place. The course was two miles in the heat of a late August afternoon in Georgia. The delay cost her too much time in the eyes of the coach. Didn’t she understand that she was in a race? Yes. She understood it well.
Her dilemma, though, was not from a lack of understanding. It was from an abundance of compassion. No, the other girl was not on her team. Yes, she knew she would forfeit ranking higher in the race. This scenario was the desire to win versus the moral implications of leaving another human person in a bad situation. It was what everyone was screaming at her versus what she knew to be right. It was what others thought versus the kind of person she wants to be. It was how she would want someone to treat her if she were in that other girl’s shoes.
What is so baffling is that many people have told her since then that she shouldn’t care. It’s telling an eleven year old girl that she should only care about someone if they are on her team. She should care about herself more and a race that changes nothing in the grand scheme of things. That’s simply wrong. She was ridiculed because she cared about another whom she does not know. That’s wrong. Even at eleven, she knew what was right and she did it.
This is what all things come down to. Our children need to understand that compassion and empathy are more important than coming in first. Winning the race is not the answer. Love is. She understood it without having to make a conscious decision about it. It’s who she is.
My warrior fought the battle. She didn’t win the race, but she won the day. I know beyond a doubt that what she did was so much more crucial to who she will become than any race. Honestly, even if she placed last, I simply couldn’t be prouder.