During the haunting emptiness of the COVID lockdown, I encountered a profound lesson about human connection in the most unexpected place – the lobby of my office building.
While most of the city remained shut down, I was among the few who ventured back to work after restrictions eased. There, I met (let’s call him) “Bob”, our new security guard, though “met” might be too generous a term for our initial interactions.
Every morning, I would greet Bob with a cheerful “hi.” And every morning, for six long months, I was met with silence. Not even a glance. Just the heavy weight of unacknowledged words hanging in the air.
As other tenants gradually returned to the building, whispers began circulating in elevator rides. “Maybe he’s racist,” some speculated. Others dismissed him as “just miserable.” “Did you hear him yelling again?” He earned the nickname “Grumpy Pants” among the building’s occupants.
But I persisted. Perhaps it was the therapist in me, or maybe just human instinct, but I continued my daily ritual of greeting Bob, expecting nothing in return.
Then, one unremarkable morning became remarkable. After a year of one-sided hellos, Bob said “hi” back. I actually stopped in my tracks, stunned by those two simple letters that had finally bridged our silence.
It was a small crack in what I would later learn was a thick wall built by years of pain.
From there, our connection grew like a tender seedling breaking through concrete. When I asked about his day, he began to share – first complaints about work, then deeper truths.
One day, seeing him alone in the lobby with his McDonald’s lunch, I invited him to join me in my suite. His surprised response – “Really, can I?” – revealed volumes about how rarely such simple kindnesses had been extended to him.
Over lunch, Bob’s story unfolded. He spoke of a childhood shadowed by a mother’s bitterness and criticism, of growing up under the weight of coldness and mean-spirited words.
Now, life had come full circle, and he found himself caring for this same mother in her old age, a duty he approached with obvious confliction.
In that moment, I saw not the “unfriendly” security guard, but a wounded child who had learned to protect himself with the same prickly armor that had hurt him.
Our unlikely “friendship” continued for two years, until the day Bob appeared at my office door, shattered. He was losing his job, his mother was dying, and he had just been diagnosed with cancer.
“I have no one to go to,” he confessed. I listened to him and consoled him the best I could. I told him to keep in touch, but he didn’t. It was the last time I saw him.
Although I don’t know what became of Bob. I am glad I had met him and hopefully, made his life better somehow.
I share Bob’s story because we all have a “Bob” in our lives (or perhaps we are Bob) – someone who seems determined to push away kindness, someone who presents to the world a harsh exterior that invites harsh treatment in return.
It’s easy to write such people off, to treat them as they seem to be asking to be treated – with distance, dismissal, or disdain.
But when we respond to difficulty with difficulty, to coldness with coldness, we merely perpetuate the cycle that created that behavior in the first place.
The challenge – and the opportunity – is to treat people not as they ought to be treated, but as they need to be treated.
To offer the very thing that was missing in their lives: patience instead of rejection, kindness instead of criticism, persistence instead of abandonment.
Every one of us has been a “Bob” at certain times in our lives. And every one of us craves the same thing when we screw up or behave poorly. We desire connection, acceptance, and understanding, even those of us who seem to reject it most forcefully.
Sometimes, the people who appear least deserving of compassion are the ones who need it most desperately.
By staying grounded in our values of love and kindness, especially when it’s difficult, we can create small miracles of transformation.
Jesus taught, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But perhaps we might adapt this slightly:
Do unto others as they need done unto them,
regardless of how they first appear. In doing so, we don’t just make their world better – we make the whole world better, one stubborn “hi” at a time.
