You Know Life’s Burden – Don’t Add to Theirs

You know the inner burden,

That harrowing burden of life,

You know it very personally,

That feeling of anxious strife.

The next person’s not so different,

If you think life’s pretty tough,

It’s good to extend them grace,

So their life’s not so rough.

BURDENS are those struggles that follow us each day, all our lives, only that we have that short reprieve every now and then. If there isn’t anything to be anxious about, we find something. Perhaps it’s a case that we are free of anxiousness and we may be anxious because it’s so strange.

This is not to paint a picture of a life overrun with anxiousness; but there is always a stressor that bears down making reality something of a true performance. Pity we don’t always want to perform. We know the common burdens of life, almost as much as we know how much relief means, and how unfair burdens added are, it seems.

Given the knowledge we have about our own burdens, why on earth do we allow ourselves to add to others’ burdens? We may see it as ‘you get what you give’, but that isn’t a sound basis for living a good life.

Our aim should be to not add unnecessarily to others’ burdens, given that we recognise the additional stress upon them. Sometimes we cannot avoid it, however. It’s not as if this is asking us to be people-pleasers – to make it so the people we know don’t bear any pain. But we do what we can to relieve the unnecessary burden.

Ways of Lightening Burdens

Rather than adding burdens we could more nobly find ways of lightening the burdens of others. These are the little things. These are those things that encourage people in very small ways; almost the smaller the better. In fact, the smallest of deeds are hardly repayable, and that’s the point. Making people feel they should be repaying just adds to their burden. The idea of lightening burdens is about making them feel comfortable at receiving a blessing.

If we are able to encourage someone by doing something ever so small they may be convinced of the power of lightening another’s burden.

We want them to pay it forward.

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Life is a burdensome thing, so we know the needs of others – to have their burdens lightened. The smaller the good deed the better. Insignificant deeds are more significant, because we went out of our way to do something small. Little things, done regularly, say more overall.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.