Why Aren't They Barefoot, Too?

My mom was a flower child who grew up in the 70’s, wore her hair in two long braids, or flowing freely without a care in the world, and spent all of her free time playing guitar in the park where everybody from Westchester High went when they skipped class. To me there was no one quite like her, and her otherworldly personality differed almost completely from the people we were surrounded by when we moved from New York to Maine. Talk about a culture shock. I always wondered why the other adults weren’t smiling as much as my mom, and why they didn’t seem to be barefoot… ever. It wasn’t something that made sense to me as a young girl who had learned everything about life from her single mom.

I think I was around the age of eleven when I finally asked her why she was so different from everybody else, and the answer she gave me truly shaped who I am and how I navigate the world to this day.

“I was raised to believe that even the people who seem like they’re bad deserve to be given as much love as the people who seem like they’re good. Bad people are just people who are having a hard time right now, but if you send enough love their way, they’ll start sending it to other people.” She said to me with what seemed like her entire heart.

Now, this was her way of explaining this to a young girl who did not fully understand the world yet, but now I’m thirty, and I can relay the message to the world in a way that I hope will resonate with you the way it did with me. Think about this: no one is born a bad person. No one is born racist, prejudice, or hateful. We are all conditioned from a very young age by the people with whom we spend the most time. Growing up, I was able to watch my mom interact with so many different types of people in the exact same way. Rich people, poor people, black people, white people, and even the ones I thought looked a little scary as a kid – she spoke to them with love and without judgment. How beautiful is that? How lucky am I to have learned that neither social status nor the color of your skin was to be used as a determining factor for how much love you deserve?

I wasn’t aware of it at eleven years old, but I’m aware now that a lot of people were not as lucky as me. Racism is still real today because it’s passed on from generation to generation. Severe separation of social classes is still real today because (some) rich families do not allow their children to mix with children lower on the social charts. Now, please understand that none of this is to place blame on anyone. We are all simply sponges that absorb what we’ve learned from the last generation of our bloodline, and I really think we’re all just doing the best we can. I’m not in any place to judge anyone, and that is the single most important thing I learned from my flower-crown-wearing, beautiful angel of a mother. I will admit that there were a few lost years during my time on this earth as a teenager, but adulthood has brought me full circle. I’m as weird as they come as far as society is concerned, but I just don’t care about what you think of me, and I especially don’t care about what you choose to do with your own life (in the most loving way possible, no joke). The sooner you embrace who you truly are, stop judging other people, and replace the hate in your heart with love, the sooner you can experience actual happiness.

Ask the most zen people on Earth, and they’ll tell you the same thing. I’ll wait. (And odds are, they'll be barefoot.)