Just talking

I can hardly believe that an entire year had already passed by since our house in the roses got repainted, early last summer. 

 

Time is an amazing creature, isn’t it?   Nobody owns it, no body can hold time.  Time is a mystical wild horse… it passed by the pathways and trails of our lives in swiftly manners, and if we aren’t paying enough attention, it will go by and we’ll never see it again… we must retain it, we must pay attention to time and hold it very dearly and very tight onto our hearts, even if it is only for a moment…

Live, laugh and love with all your heart… do everything with gusto, because perhaps you won’t have another change… there’s not a day that passes that I won’t think of my dear mother… and how I wish I could go to that clock which is life and rewind it. Rewind it to those days when she used to laugh out loud and to those days when we would hold hands and walk to wherever we were going talking and laughing and owning our moments together…

 

Early at the beginning of this month, as I was going out for my daily morning walk throughout our neighborhood, I found a most disturbing thing in my garden… someone had pushed down the beautiful and dense Virginia creeper that for years and years had mantled our fence and beautified the path or corridor that serves as the garden entrance.  

Everything was on the floor, big beautiful branches laid broken and distorted on the floor, and leaves were scattered everywhere. Someone had taken the trouble to pushed the entire vine off the fence and had trashed it onto our side of the fence… I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and how sad!  I knew it had to be an unconsidered someone, but who? 

The previous night I had heard our neighbor shouting at someone as he was pulling in his trailer onto the narrow alley separated by our mutual fence.  Apparently, the vine must had bothered him in some unusual way, or maybe he was just drunk... and thus went on destroying it…

I felt very distressed about it, but decided to move on and continue with my daily routine.  I would worry about the vine when I came back.  To top it all off, I was feeling rotten that morning.  One of my legs and hip was causing me problems and I could hardly walked…  but I kept on walking or limping, immersed in my frustrations…

A woman was coming towards me from the other side of the road, I saw her looking straight at me from the distance, but I kept to myself, immersed as I was on my morning’s miseries.  Then, as she approached, I heard her offering a most questionable “good morning!”—you know the kind, like forcing you, like when somebody say “thank you” but they don’t really mean it and their only intention is to inflict the nasty disruptive feeling of “violation of personal integrity” on you.  No, it wasn’t a good morning.  It wasn’t a good time to smile or even to raise up my eyes from the road, and yet there she was forcing me; forcing me to smile and to have to say something I didn’t feel. 

The feeling was exactly the same in texture and flavor as the feeling that comes with having been raped, but is a lot less intense. I always greet people with whom I meet on my walks, or I would say something and smile, but if they don’t respond, or if I notice they are not willing to reciprocate, I won’t force.  It is wrong to force people, even wronger to force them into gratifying or pleasing you, and wronger still, to dictate exactly how you want them to gratify you.

 

Be happy, be kind. Don’t force people to please you by making them do what you consider is right, or it should be done… Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.  This is my motto, whenever I meet people… anyone… Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.