“Don’t crash into that nice lady in the monster truck with the neck tattoos, Brandon!”

This phrase seems to be a daily occurrence around my home. Well, at least a variation of it. I’m someone who likes to play games and find myself constantly making up new ones with my fiancée, the aforementioned Brandon. One of these is “the nice lady” or “the nice man” game.

Here’s how we play:

Everywhere we go, everyone we meet, no matter how gruff or gnarled, we call nice. This could be the lady at Kroger who just rammed her shopping cart in my knees or a guy who cut me off in a yellow, wood-paneled PT Cruiser. Certainly our tone changes (read: laced with irony) depending on whom we mention, but we still try to call everyone nice. In the beginning it resulted in raucous laughter from me, but now the game has taken on a new form: I’m starting to mean what I say.

The thing is, the more people you meet, the more lives you’re involved with, the more you realize how complicated life can be. You never know what someone is secretly going through or what their unspoken struggle is. You don’t know their childhood, their current family situation, or perhaps more simply, the particular way their body is feeling today. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, the clean slate of just being the “nice lady” or “nice man,” is just one way to admit, “yeah, we’re all human.”

Sometimes I find myself hesitating to write in emails, “I hope all this meets you well,” because I can’t see what’s happening on the receiving end of my message. But I do hope that for everyone – even the most difficult of people – things are well.

Let’s keep it up, keep hoping, keep being fast and friendly. Let’s play “the nice game” and wipe the slate clean (even with ourselves). There’s no telling how things might improve.

-BA