We Are All Trying Our Best

On kindness, free will, and remembering that everyone is learning in real time

Some days I have to remind myself—quietly, almost like a prayer—that this is everyone’s first time here.

No one tells you that adulthood is mostly improvisation. That the confidence you admire in other people is often just muscle memory built from surviving their own private chaos. That most of us are walking around with invisible instruction manuals written in pencil, constantly being erased and rewritten.

We like to believe there’s a correct way to live. A right pace. A right timeline. A version of ourselves we were supposed to arrive at by now. But the truth is more tender than that. We are all learning in real time. Learning how to love without losing ourselves. Learning how to soften without breaking. Learning how to exist in a world that keeps asking more of us than we were ever taught to give.

And still—we wake up and try.

There’s something grounding about remembering that we all entered this life the same way: unknowing. No one comes equipped with foresight. No one gets to preview the moments that will harden them or humble them or crack them open. We’re all just responding to what’s happened to us so far, hoping our responses make sense later.

That’s where free will comes in—not as this grand, cinematic power, but as something quieter. More personal. Free will shows up in how we interpret the world. In the meaning we assign to other people’s actions. In whether we assume malice or leave space for humanity.

Because it is a choice to see the glass half empty. Sometimes it’s a learned one. A protective one. Life has a way of teaching us to expect disappointment, to stay guarded, to read everything as a warning. Especially if you’ve been hurt before. Especially if softness once cost you something.

But I wonder—what happens when we choose, again and again, to see people as trying their best?

Not excusing harm. Not romanticizing dysfunction. Just acknowledging that most people are operating from a place of incomplete information, emotional inheritance, and survival. Most people are not villains. They are tired. They are scared. They are doing what they know how to do—until they learn something different.

When I hold that truth gently, something shifts in me. My body relaxes. My reactions soften. I stop carrying other people’s rough edges as proof that the world is cruel. I stop making everything personal.

Science calls this perspective-taking. The nervous system experiences it as relief.

When we choose empathy—real empathy, not performative kindness—we lower our own stress. We regulate ourselves. We give our minds permission to rest instead of staying on high alert. The world feels less hostile when you’re not constantly bracing for impact.

And still, I won’t pretend this is easy.

Especially when life has made you cautious. When the childlike part of you—the part that believed people meant well, the part that sparkled without effort—feels distant. Relearning kindness can feel like learning a new language after years of silence.

But maybe kindness isn’t about returning to who we were before the world touched us. Maybe it’s about choosing softness after.

Choosing it with awareness. With boundaries. With discernment. Choosing it not because life has been gentle—but because you’ve decided not to let it make you small or sharp or closed.

On Christmas Day, I went to the cemetery to visit my cousin. The air felt different there—quiet in that particular way it only is when the rest of the world is celebrating somewhere else. Joy happening loudly, just out of reach.

As I was leaving, I noticed a woman standing by a newer headstone. She looked up at me and said, Merry Christmas. Not cheerfully. Just reflexively. Like something you offer when there aren’t enough words for grief.

I had extra roses in my hand. I could have said it back and kept walking. That would have been enough. Polite. Complete.

Instead, I gave them to her.

Later, I thought about how this might have been the hardest day of her life. How those flowers (so small to me) might have softened it, even briefly. How often we underestimate the weight of small gestures because they feel ordinary in our hands.

We don’t get to choose what shaped us. But we do get to choose how we move forward. How we treat ourselves when we fall short. How we interpret humanity in others. How much grace we allow to exist in the room.

On the days when everything feels heavy, I try to remember this:

I am learning how to live.
So are they.

And if that’s true—if we are all doing this for the first time—then kindness isn’t naïve.

It’s intentional.
It’s practiced.
It’s an act of quiet rebellion.

And maybe, over time, that choice—the choice to see effort instead of failure, humanity instead of threat—is how the sparkle finds its way back.

I don’t know what she was carrying—but I know I get to decide what I add to it.

Only in Hindsight,

Leslie