
“My current struggle is the ability to remember the kindness of different people when I’m in an altercation with them or when I see them doing something negative. For example, today at work, my chef, she went and talked to the garbage man. She asked him, ‘oh, can you please get the garbage in the corner?’ And he made a big fuss. He was treating her very rudely – the garbage man was being rude. So, I had this initial instinct – ‘oh, this guy is a dick,’ you know. The thing is, my mind just grasps onto the idea that this man is a dick, but doesn’t see him in context. In context, this man might be a very lovely father, this man is the reason why our restaurant stays so clean, this man might be someone’s best friend, he might be consoling someone – who knows what kind of struggles he’s going through? But the problem is the mind just grabs onto the immediate experience – ‘oh, he’s a dick – a hundred percent dick.’ Whereas in reality, if you use your investigative imagination, you can come up with very many situations and see that ‘oh, he could be a very nice gentleman, or he could be having a very bad day.’ So, my struggle is counteracting my initial perceptions of others– which is also very inspired by Buddhist philosophy.”
HUMANS OF OTTAWA
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