The Right Place at the Right Time

I was walking out of a restroom this morning when a woman walked in and I noticed that she was crying. I had just gone for a walk because I needed to clear my head. I was thinking about Thoreau and how he believed that man is, at its core, truly unhappy. He believed that sometimes those thoughts of displeasure are tucked away but they tend to resurface now and again; reminding man that he is unsatisfied with his life. (An interesting tidbit: In Buddhism, that philosophy is called Dukkha and is roughly translated to mean living with suffering.)
With Thoreau's thoughts on my mind and the walk behind me, I decided to go into the restroom for one final moment to myself before heading back to work. I allowed myself a few minutes to strategize about how I was going to manage the hectic weeks ahead of me and then I focused on the one part of me that was seeing those thoughts float by and I cleared everything else out of my mind. I sat there for a while - just being - and I felt somewhat restored. And at the moment when I felt that I had accomplished my task of shoving out the negative thoughts, I ran into that woman at the sinks. She was wiping a few tears from her face; attempting to hide her crying but it was obvious that she was shaken up. As a woman, it isn't rare to see another women visibly upset in a restroom so you learn to gauge people's needs; whether they need someone to talk to or whether they need to be alone. This woman looked scared and vulnerable so I decided to see if she was okay.
She was receptive to my concern and told me about her recent Epileptic attack. She said she is given enough warning to be able to brace herself but unfortunately, this time she was around a group of co-workers and was mortified when she began to seize. As soon as she regained control of her body, she rushed to the restroom to regain her composure. There's a possibility that she wished she'd been alone in that bathroom, but I hope that she was as relieved to run into me as I was to run into her. Maybe for her I needed to be there because she needed someone to sympathize with her epilepsy. And for me, maybe she was there because I needed genuine human interaction; I needed my day to mean something; something other than meaning to make money. I'm sorry that my sense of fulfillment came at her expense but the next time I'm having a rough day I hope to remember that maybe my discomfort is helping someone else to feel fulfilled by helping me.