Rough Hewn: Boundaries

It was a small thing, hardly worth remembering, the sort of moment most people wouldn’t notice at all. And yet it stayed with me, as small moments sometimes do.

While standing in a queue, I observed a man in front of me who had stepped too close to a lady. Too close to that invisible boundary each of us guards without even knowing we guard it.

The lady said softly, “Would you move back, please?” Nothing harsh. Just a request.

The man’s family was standing nearby. Their faces changed at once. Not anger, but something wounded. Pride, perhaps. As if her words had touched a nerve they did not know was exposed. By defending her own space, she had trespassed into theirs.

Some time passed. Then their boy, eight years old or so, rode a luggage trolley straight at the complaining lady’s leg, fast and reckless. There was childish mischief in it, but also something deliberate. The lady jumped aside just in time. When I turned, I caught the boy looking at his mother. She was giggling.

That giggle… almost cheerful, somehow felt more cruel than the trolley ramming ever could.

It was the giggle of someone who enjoys another person’s discomfort, who feels a small victory in another’s trouble. I recognised that it was the laugh of someone who has little real power and tries to make up for it by seizing any moment to feel above another human being.

As I walked away, I kept thinking: what sort of inner emptiness drives a person to laugh only when someone else suffers? Why this weakness? What hidden struggle makes them seek comfort in another’s unease? 

Slowly I understood that their reaction, their sharpened pride, the child’s small act of vengeance, the mother’s giggle, nothing in their reaction had anything to do with the lady. Not her request, not her voice. It came entirely from their own need to feel in control of a world that refuses to obey them and is slipping away from them.

Facing such moments, our task is simple, though not easy: to guard our space, our dignity, the fragile boundary of our own being. Another person’s anger, their mockery, these are their burdens, not ours. Heavy ones, perhaps heavier than we will ever know.

We try to mould the world. When we fail, some among us accept the limits without complaint; others do not. For them, bitterness settles in. Soon, they forget what caused the bitterness, yet they keep it close, as if it defines them.”