After several month's practice, I am now refining my recyclable waste collection thing to a fine art. I have discovered, for instance, that the area around bus stops can provide particularly rich pickings, so much so that every couple of weeks I can pick up several pounds weight of the stuff from some of them.
Yesterday I was picking cans out of a shrub adjacent to one stop and laying them in a line on the ground prior to crushing them, when a woman began picking them up and carefully depositing them in a nearby waste bin. Distressed, as I know from there they will end in landfill and not the recycling dump, I stopped her and explained what I was doing. She had a lined, pinched face, and when she smiled I could see she had even fewer teeth than me. Her eyes were a dull grey, and it was evident there wasn't a lot going on behind them.
"I'm disabled, see", she explained. Before I could stop myself I shot back with:
"Well I worked that out."
Immediately I could see, even with her limited sophistication, that my remark had struck home.
"I was only trying to help" she said, and moved off to talk to someone else.
I have rarely felt such a bully. The Dalai Lama is often asked what is the secret of life, happiness, etc, and he often replies on the lines of:
"Really, the best way to live is to be kind to people."
I usually try to follow this precept, but on this occasion I failed badly, building, by what the DL preaches, some pretty bad karma for myself. So I say to you, disabled lady: I apologise for my cruelty. Please forgive my crassness of yesterday.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment