The Girl on the Train.

On Monday, I finished The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.  I had heard mixed reviews, and actually the cashier at the local Books-A-Million said that people either loved it or hated it...  I supposed that I would be in the latter group...

Reading The Girl on the Train in my new Ravenclaw lounge pants.
Definite nerd, right here...

But I wasn't.  I loved it.  Maybe it's because I adore psychological thrillers where I'm kept guessing who the culprit is right up to the reveal.  Maybe.

Maybe it was, perhaps, that I actually took something away from this novel.  The description on Goodreads says that it "will forever change the way you look at other people's lives."  And, boy, did it...

I guess that it is part of our modern human nature to assume that someone's outward appearance shows their inner self.  Actually, on second thought, maybe it's a learned skill...  We're taught at a very early age that if someone is smiling, then they're happy.  If someone is frowning or crying, then they're sad, upset.  But we have gotten extremely proficient at hiding our emotions with a smile.  We no longer glower at someone when we're angry or sulk when we are depressed...we smile and go on.  We hold everything in--our emotions, secrets, opinions, our past--until we are about to bust at the seams.  And it's at this exact point that we lash out at any and everyone in our path.

And every single person does this.  

You and I both know that we keep quiet about the things that bother us.  We hold it inside instead of speaking out about it.  We know this is common, that other people go through this just the same.  Then why, someone please tell me why, do we judge and assume the worst of others when we are on the receiving side of someone else's blow-up?  We have no clue the struggles and trials that God has placed before them, no idea of the path that they are travelling on.  But we continue to judge them because maybe they hurt our feelings.  We don't take the time to figure out what's really going on...

I've started to think about it this way:  I'm just the girl on the train.  I'm just passing by, peering into someone's life (daily, weekly, monthly, whatnot).  I only get to see a short portion of what goes on, and I can only see a few certain aspects of their life.  The train, called life, just rolls by too quickly for me to stop and really look around, to investigate.  So what I see during these snippets of other people's lives aren't the whole story--it may not even be the true story.  And because I cannot be sure that I'm getting the whole truth, I will stop judging, stop assuming things about others based just on what I see.  

And so this girl on the train is going to start making some stops in people's lives and really get to know who people are.