April 15
The People at the Edges
Our first thoughts about harm often concern family, close friends, and people we once loved. Others come less readily to mind: a coworker who covered our unfinished work, someone we mocked to win a laugh, a person whose repeated kindness we took for granted. They occupied smaller places in our story, so we may have assumed our behavior occupied a small place in theirs.
A more thorough view does not require inventing injuries or assigning ourselves importance we did not have. It asks us to remember that people outside our closest circle had lives and concerns of their own. A careless act could have mattered even when the relationship was brief. Our responsibility is measured by what we did and its effects, not by how central the person remained to us afterward. There are names worth remembering that never appeared in our most familiar account of the past.
Whom have I overlooked because the relationship mattered less to me?
A brief acquaintance was still a person.
For the A.A. nerds: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Step Eight, pp. 81–82.