Am I a bad rock?

 

I am out of sorts.  Children who are a little sick and not quite right.  It is hot.  My partner is cranky.  I am working someplace different this week and it is not quite right.  It is so easy to fall into the cranky spaces.  The looping internal dialogue that it is always like this, why me, why are children so crazy.......  But really that is just life.


I am thinking about rocks some more.  Walking through a gravel lot the other day I was thinking about rocks and the seashore and then sea glass.  Given the high traffic at the beaches in Vancouver, sea glass is hard to find.  You have to determine the precise point between broken glass and sea glass and compromise a bit or it will be picked up by somebody else.  But that fascinates me.  One moment it is broken glass that nobody wants to touch and in the next state it is something beautiful that people want to take home as a memory of their holidays.  I was thinking about whether we treat people this way?  You are broken and too dangerous.  You are something broken that has come through.  One we will touch.  The other is garbage.


The analogy does not quite work, but I have been thinking about it every time I see a homeless person.  I don't want to get involved or touch.  I want to "help" and be a good person - but not that other.  I want to help the person who is now sea glass with the edges polished off.  And what does that make me?