A speaker reflects on witnessing a woman drop an Oreo wrapper and what it taught her about choosing compassion over judgment in small moments. A reminder that kindness costs nothing when we pause instead of react.
Let me tell you something that happened to me that I'm not proud of. I'm walking down the street, and there's this lady in front of me, and she's eating a freaking Oreo. And as she puts the Oreo in her mouth, she drops the Oreo wrapper on the ground. So I'm like, how dare she does this? What a horrible human being. So I walk up, I grab that Oreo, I go to a bin, and I drop it in the bin and turn around and kind of give her a judgy look, and she looks at me. She stops dead in a trap. And then she starts crying, and I'm like, why are you crying? And she goes, I'm so sorry. I lit it this morning. My boyfriend dumped me. Oh, man. And my mind was on so many different things, I didn't realize I dropped the wrapper. I labeled her a litterbug without understanding what was really happening in her soul. She was a sweet woman who went through a hard time and made a mistake, and I felt bad. When you are seeing the world through the lens of compassion and emanating that compassion, if the rapper dropped, you might pick it up still, you might drop it. But you don't feel like you need to prove the other person wrong, and you wouldn't judge the other person. And your default thinking might more likely be, I wonder if she's okay.
