I spent most of the week thinking I can’t work out why people do things;  why is there so much confrontation, bitterness and such a toxic environment in my work.   I have never been able to work out what motivates people to strive for more, when they have everything; to suppress people they already have power over;  and what motivates people to have more and more of something they could never possibly use (power or money).

I am writing this post after a particularly hard week which changed in the blink of an eye.

I was driving along gripping the steering wheel a bit too hard, in heavy traffic in the city, ruminating about something that I now can’t remember – but I can tell you I was right about my ruminating, I knew I was right because I was angry about it!  Every wrong that had happened to me in the past was flashing into my head in the stop-go traffic.  I was the only decent driver on the road at the time and all the pedestrians should have been driving because their presence on the road was shitting me.  I was profiling and judging everyone, past, present and future – all bad.

I noticed a very well built middle eastern man walking along the street (muscles from steroids I surmised) wearing a tight T-shirt (which was too tight and just his way of being a complete poser).  He stopped at a sausage sizzle (I remembered, I hate sausage sizzles as the sausages are always cold and overcooked and the onions aren’t cooked enough) and bourght a sausage in bread (so much for the healthy body builder diet) and walked off down the footpath.

I was just about to lose interest (he had shit me enough already) when he hesitated as he passed a homeless guy who was sitting on the footpath.  The homeless guy had a small sign which they guy stopped to read.  He then took half a pace to walk away and stopped again.  He then turned back and handed the homeless guy the sausage in bread he had just bought.  The homeless guy smiled and nodded and the meat headed body builder in the tight T-shirt who seconds before I had hated for no reason, became a Saint.  I didn’t see the face of the bodybuilder guy as he walked off, but I am sure it was a whole lot better than the face I had looked at him with.

I didn’t see the lights change a first as I must have got something in my eye as they were a bit watery.

Just when I am not being the better man, I see the better man walking down the street.

Maybe looking for the better man is not always about looking inwards and making it all about me.  My bad week, just became a good day.