When I was seven or eight, a good friend of mine took a blow to the face so hard it made me cry.
It’s been almost forty years and I can still see the scene. My friend was sprinting across the playground. We were playing tag and he was being chased. Recess was almost over but there was always time for one more round. Another kid came down the slide just as my friend reached the bottom, and my friend tripped hard over the other kid. He couldn’t catch himself and his face met the pavement at full speed.
He jumped to his feet, screaming. One of the recess aids came running over and pulled his hands away from his face. One of his eyes was already swelling shut. It ballooned so fast that I thought something inside him was going to burst. I’d never seen anything like that, much less happen in real time. I honestly believed his eye was going to pop out of the socket any second.
The aid whisked him to the office as fast as she could go, and I held it together until I got home. Then I sat on my mom’s bed, laid my head on her shoulder, and cried. I couldn’t explain why I was so wrecked about it. He was one of my close friends, but I barely understood what had happened.
I just knew that I hurt watching him hurt.
That’s my earliest memory of recognizing, even if I couldn’t frame it in these words, that I care deeply about the pain of other people.
There’s no heroic origin story there, though perhaps a hero complex was born. I didn’t become a doctor. I’ve never run into a burning building to save someone’s cat. That day, though, I learned something about myself: other people’s pain — their storms — affect me, often more than my own.
That tendency has followed me — sometimes as empathy, sometimes as a burden, and sometimes as a complicated desire to “fix” things I was never asked to fix.
Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that being a good person, especially a man, meant being a protector; a calm-in-the-chaos presence. I started to see myself as someone who needs to step in, absorb the tension, and make things right.
Of course, we know that we can’t control the storms of life. We only get to control how we stand in them.
Years ago, I had a friend who understood that better than I did.
We were both only nineteen. We’d been asked to meet someone, a much older man, who was going to be mentoring and working with my friend. Circumstances were a bit odd, and we had to meet the guy at a specific place and time. We arrived right on time, or at least when we were told we needed to be there.
When the man arrived, late based on what we had been told, he jumped out of his car already red-faced and loud, wondering where we had been — why we were so late. He didn’t try to confirm any details. He just tore into us for not being where we were “supposed to be,” for “wasting his valuable time,” and for “making him late for more important things.”
I remember feeling my jaw clench and my blood pressure rise. I was ready for a fight, and I wasn’t even the one who had to work with the guy.
My friend just stood there, completely unfazed. And when the man finished his rant, my friend reached out his hand, and without any sarcasm or anger, calmly introduced himself with an “I’m glad to meet you” as the silent exclamation point that demonstrated how much more mature my friend was than the 60-year-old man in front of us.
I think about that experience all the time when I’m getting fired up about something that probably doesn’t matter.
My friend had genuine humility and… stillness.
He had a personal mantra: “No regrets.” What I’ve forgotten, at times, is that doesn’t usually mean doing big things or taking big risks. That experience with my friend taught me something completely different, though. He didn’t want to look back and regret acting out of anger. He didn’t want to add any fire to the situation just to prove he was “strong” too.
His calm didn’t make the storm go away. The older man didn’t apologize, but his posture did change. The edge dropped from his voice. The man stooped to pick up my friend’s bag and they walked to his car without another word.
I’ve wondered about the conversation in the car as the two of them drove away. I lost touch with that friend after that experience.
I’ve wondered, as well, how many times I’ve made a bad situation worse because I’ve believed that being strong required standing my ground instead of softening it.
And that’s why I come back to that moment so often.
I have tried to live like that friend. I’ve failed more times than I could ever count. The older I get, the more I realize that my version of “being good in a storm” often looks like trying to control the storm.
Especially when it comes to people I care about.
Watching people suffer, particularly people I feel responsible for, hurts me. My wife. My kids. Women in my life who’ve been hurt by stupid people. My impulse is to swoop in, fix the problem, and absorb as much of their pain as I can.
I do it because I genuinely care about people. I used to joke all the time that I went into computers because I didn’t have to deal with people, but the truth is I love people.
A hard reality to accept, however, is that sometimes that urge to protect crosses over into an attempt to control situations and outcomes, so carefully masked as compassion that I often don’t see it for what it is.
There’s a fine line between caring and rescuing and just helicoptering; between showing up for someone in the right way versus shielding them from the very thing that might help them grow.
I think about how many times I’ve stepped in when I wasn’t asked. How often I’ve made a hard moment about my role in it, rather than about the person actually experiencing it.
That’s one of the storms I’m in now. It’s not an external one. I’m trying to figure out what it means to still care deeply without letting that translate into trying to orchestrate the outcome. To be present without being controlling. To believe that other people can survive hard things without me steadying their ship.
Sometimes, the most “good” I can do in a storm is not stepping in to manage it. Just being near. Calm. Not escalating. Not explaining. Not fixing.
If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of honest reflections about identity, meaning, and building a life you don’t want to run away from.
You can check it out here: https://books.by/aaronpace
I’m learning that real strength is mostly quiet. It’s hard to imagine, but real strength mostly doesn’t rush in. It also doesn’t need to be right. And it doesn’t take away a person’s opportunity to grow just because it’s hard.
Real strength remembers what others are enduring and how sometimes all you can do is be scared for them, cry when you get home, and be glad with them when they show back up with a black eye and no lasting damage.
I suppose I’ll always have a protector’s instinct. I’ll still struggle with the desire to intervene, absorb the impact, and reframe the story for someone else. I don’t always know where the line is between love and overreach. I don’t always trust that things will work out if I don’t steer.
But I’m learning that sometimes, being a good man in a storm just means staying grounded. Letting people feel what they feel. And being someone who doesn’t make it worse or take away their opportunity to learn.
And that is enough.
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