good grace

clear in the still

I reckon I get through each day with at least 5 tuts. Not mine, theirs. Tuts at people jolting past, at outfits worn, and voices expressing too loudly, too quietly or at all. Each day I see people annoyed at people on TV, in the streets or packed into places.

Perhaps I am more sensitive about it at the minute. At the minute, I’m all too aware that there are people who aren’t well enough to venture outside yet; there are people who are having to recreate their lives around gaping holes where their jobs used to be. And so, with those eyes, I see people reacting to the fact they don’t seem to know what they are born with. They don’t know the power innate in them, what a shift an attitude can bring or the difference grace can offer to their world. People are so busy trying to live efficiently that they’re missing living at all.

It amuses me and saddens me that, nowadays, considerate people stand out as having their own style. You can spot them easily. They’re the ones who don’t rise because they choose not to see the bait. Their pace is soft, focused but soft. Their gait is light, they don’t pound their way along the pavement. They smile slightly as they weave through a crowd of straight-walkers. Their grace is not weakness or subservience, but strength to quietly carve a path through the onslaught of so many irrelevant pressures.

If only people didn’t think themselves so time poor that there’s no space for consideration. If only people had enough grace to allow the next to walk as they chose. If only people felt like they could take a breath before they spout anger. How different that day would be. I reckon I could get through each of those days with at least 5 smiles in that world. And that’s mine, not even counting theirs.

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden