meandering

I've occasionally heard people say, "It's ALL good" and it usually bugged the hell out of me for some reason or other.  It can't ALL be good, can it?  Certain things just aren't good.  My point, however, is that I surprised myself more than once this week by observing something that didn't look too good but it seemed to morph into something fine, okay, maybe even good the longer I viewed it/him/her.  It now seems to me that I, other people, inanimate objects are caught in a whirl of accidents, accidental neglect, ineptitude, ignorance, selfishness and subjective judgments (the inanimate objects, I imagine, should be exempted from the latter since we do perceive inanimate objects as passive).  For instance, the interesting patch job performed on my hotel room wall.  It is not a thing of beauty, so my first reaction would have been to pronounce it bad.   But something seems to be changing in me, and this is probably good.  I took a second look at the seemingly horrible job that someone had done to correct a hole in the wall and suddenly saw that we are all connected in this mess called life.  I see the wall, the wall was touched by some destructive hand or foot, it was again touched by a different hand that attempted to correct the injury.   The owners/managers are an extended family of Indian or Pakistani descent, and I especially like the older couple who clean the rooms together each morning.  Perhaps someone did their very best on the wall.  Perhaps the conditions at the hotel that fall short of American standards are very good and acceptable in some other countries or places.  I look at the wall and feel a certain empathy for it.  Someone tried to fix it but it's no longer the simple wall that used to be.  It now carries a big scar.  And maybe my own big scars are teaching me to look at things around me less critically.  Now if I saw insects scurrying around the room, I would be unhappy indeed.  In a Utopian world, we would learn to live in peace with our insect and rodent friends.  I've not progressed to that point.

Anyway, I am glad to be back in America.  God Bless America.

posted by: behindtheblink at 02:53 | link | comments (3) |