What was the most recent thing you saw/heard that left you feeling, to a certain degree, humbled?

I recently spent a few days with an old friend who has a severely disabled son. I was impressed (and deeply humbled) by the way she uses her considerable intelligence and determination to care for him, including getting all the social “help” agencies to actually acknowledge that they need to supply the services they promise. Her son is 14, and she also completed her degree in the last 5 years.

Gurkha gets medal for kicking Taliban ass with a tripod.

99.99% of Fluther, myself included, would probably piss themselves if they were in a similar situation. That’s pretty humbling.

Leaving the buffet after having stuffed ourselves my fiancee and I say a couple struggling to move everything they owned in two shopping carts, strollers and any other things with wheels they could tie together in a train.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Yeah, those gurkha’s are world class bad asses. Been hard as nails fighting machines for generations, long may they serve.

@ucme I concur!

I watched a program on letters from American soldiers to their loved ones.
That one got to me.

Watching the last few moments of my mother’s life and then the moment when she let it go last week. And I didn’t need the qualifier “to a certain degree.”

I just saw where a tornado ripped through a town nearby my while I was driving on the highway. Here in the Northeast, we never get tornadoes.

I stumbled on a Mental Floss article about twins, including conjoined twins. One set essentially shares a pelvis and legs, and the trunks are fused together. The girls are older (late teens/early twenties) and each has a driver’s license; they had smiles on their faces. Their grace makes all of my difficulties in life trivial.

The Hubble ultra deep field images.

In the face of these images, I think the stuff we’re so concerned about pretty much means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things except for the meanings we give them.

That my little doggie is immune to the bark collars our other two dogs wear. Since a puppy, he’s had a crippled foot, an injury done to him by previous owners and several times a year tiny bone chips work their way up through his paw. I realize the bark collar doesn’t work because his pain tolerance is so high. It’s not that he’s immune to the pain but sadder that he’s so often in a level of pain that the collar doesn’t faze him.

Earlier this year my Mom developed a blood clot in her leg, and almost died. Amazingly she is still with us, but unfortunately, her leg had to be amputated. My mom is 70, and the degree of change that she had to undergo is staggering. But, through all that, I still have not heard her complain once. She is just so content with being alive. She amazes me everyday by the will power that she has, and the inner strength that she still has in reserve. To me, this was a very humbling experience.

Cheers folks, good stuff!

About a month ago, we made friends with a family we met who were visiting their father/grandfather here in Florida. The mother and her now 12-year old daughter were in a house fire when the little girl was 14 months old. 14 MONTHS OLD. I can’t imagine. Both mother and daughter were burnt so badly their bodies are deformed and some of their appendages are missing.

We met the little girl when she boldly walked up to a place beside the pool where we were playing shuffleboard. She had never played and joyfully joined us when we asked if she would like to learn. My husband’s 14 year old twin niece and nephew were visiting us and we all became fast friends.

I was humbled by the reaction the young teens had with each other and how appearances made narry a difference to the kids. I was humbled at the faith, strength, wit and joyfulness of the mother and daughter in life.

The mother told me stories of how the little girl, even to this day, is stared at and ridiculed in school. She said when her daughter was ready to start her first year of school, friends and family begged her to home school or send the child to a private school. She said, “You know B.K., I said to them and to (my child) when she’d get off the bus every afternoon crying about things people said and did to her, ‘There are good people and bad people in this world. You are going to meet them everywhere you go. I can’t protect you from that. What you can do is ignore and move away from the bad people when you meet them and just look for the good people.’ ”

She and her daughter are now written in my book of Life Lessons. My husband said he could imagine how they would have looked without the scars, skin grafts and missing parts and he said they would both have been beautiful. I can’t explain this and I know it will sound strange, but from the minute I saw the little girl, I thought, wow she is really gorgeous. She has long honey colored hair and her eyes are as blue as anything I’ve seen.

When she got to know me, she’d put her stubbled scarred hands on my knees, bend into my face and start by saying, “B.K., do you love me?” She looked into your eyes and everyone of us said privately she could see into your soul. I’d laugh to myself because I knew she wanted to stay at my house while the niece and nephew were visiting or go to the pool with us or the movies or just ask me to let the niece use my phone so the two girls could text.

You know what? I really do love her and think she is one of the most physically beautiful people I’ve ever met in my life. It humbles me to think about her and the Life Lessons she taught me.