On the Bright Side

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The most difficult realization that comes after awareness is accepting that you have limitations. Maybe that’s where the balance lies - wedged in between your heart and mind between the crevasses that you haven’t had the courage to thoughtfully explore. The dichotomous nature of the two helps me separate what I can and cannot process while I am in the work.

There’s a crippled man across the clinic that I see a few times a week from the top floor of the lunchroom windows. It’s nice to sit and observe the city, busy with people hurrying to and from their destination. The first day that I noticed him, he was scurrying across the crowded intersection, dangerously close to cars and a herd of donkeys heading the same way. A piece of tarp was tied strategically across his bottom, wrapped around several times for cushion against the rough cement. On his hands were two flat pieces of stone, each piece held by a string like an ill-fitted pair of shoes. Every few steps, he’d pause and rest a while as the crowd moved through, oblivious to this man, walking with his hands, with the stones, with the herd of donkeys now passing him by. Every so often, the women - for the entire time that I looked on, it seemed only the women would stop to drop off a few coins. Another day, I saw him eating inside a local bakery. A few days before a woman stopped to give him a cup of coffee in return for some bread he’d been given. Today, underneath the sunny sky, he sat half clothed applying lotion to his legs. I noticed both women and men stopping this time to toss him a coin - more frequently than I’ve seen in the past. I keep telling myself that there’s so much good out there, not because I don’t believe so, but because I can be jaded by my own actions as I learn to cope with these things. I think about our work and how it fits into the bigger picture, hoping that it provides some benefit to the community we’ve come to love.

Powerful connections with individuals bridged through similarities rather than differences where there’s no distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. I underestimated the impact behind these interactions that have affectively changed the way I see the world. These strangers that pass this man who take a moment to do what they can at the moment, not realizing that each and every single one of them restore my faith with their simple deeds . Connections. Relationships. Change. And it starts.

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