That afternoon, he sat drinking coffee with a friend who was a construction engineer. The friend enthusiastically told about the bridge he had just completed, about the structure, about the load-bearing capacity of reinforced concrete. That was the very legitimate pride of someone who had spent many years calculating every number. At the next table, an old man reading a book suddenly looked up and smiled and asked: "Uncle, if the human heart also had a design, would people still fall just because of a sentence?". The engineer smiled, then fell silent.
That question followed him throughout the journey home.
We know how many tons of steel a bridge can tolerate, but no one knows how many times a person can tolerate disappointment. Some people go through one event after another and remain calm. Some people even lose sleep many nights without saying a word. The strange thing is that looking from the outside, they are no different. They still go to work, still smile, still answer: "I'm okay".
Perhaps because of that, we often treat each other as if everyone is cast in reinforced concrete. We say a word of anger without knowing it falls on a heart full of cracks. We judge very quickly because we do not see what others have silently endured. The cracks of the bridge always appear for people to repair, while the scratches in people's hearts are often covered with a smile. Thinking about it, kindness is like limiting the load on the bridge. It does not weaken people, but helps them be more enduring. A word of encouragement is sometimes not costly to the speaker, but can be the support for the listener. A timely silence is often more valuable than a piece of advice.
Humans have built bridges across the sea, mountains and dangerous rivers. Only the bridge connecting from one heart to another has no design drawn to this day. Because every bridge is calculated before the load limit. Only the human heart must learn to endure, while no one knows where its limit lies.
