is, you never really know who is sitting across from you.
You don’t know what they survived.
You don’t know whose life they saved.
You don’t know what names they still carry in their hearts.
And you certainly don’t know what a small brass pin might mean to someone who has spent a lifetime wearing it.
I am eighty-one years old.
My knees hurt when it rains.
I forget where I put my reading glasses.
And I still drive forty minutes when I want a good bowl of chili.
But
I have learned one thing that I wish every young soldier, every young leader, and every person in this world could understand:
Never measure a person’s worth by what you see when they walk into a room.
Sometimes the quiet old woman eating alone has already lived through things you cannot imagine.
Sometimes the person you mistake for a stranger helped build the very place where you stand.
And sometimes, the person you think has nothing left to teach you is carrying a lesson that took a lifetime to learn.
