Alrighty, here's the deal. I love, absolutely love, living here. I can handle the traffic, I can handle the lines, I can handle the uppity-ness, but there's one thing that I hate around here: the "I'm more important than you" thing that people do around here. I don't know if it's because people are busier here than other places or if it's because we have a high number of foreign-born people or if it's because there's too much money, but it doesn't seem to be limited to rich people. Here's the perfect example of the DC more-important-than-thou thing: you start to pull out of a parking spot. No one's coming. you are about half way out of your parking spot when someone beeps and drives past without slowing down. This is the DC "I'm coming through and you'd best get out of my way" signal.
I'm not quite sure why people do this. It makes me mad. I'm sure there are times when a person has just gotten a call that someone's in the hospital and they need to get there right away, but with the frequency that this happens, either it's just selfishness or there are a lot of people rushing to hospitals.
There are so many ills in the world. There are pointless wars, rampant hate, homelessness, poorness, starvation, addictions, deadly diseases, murders, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum. You know, I can't do a damn thing about any of it. I can donate money and time to worthy causes in my community, but really, it makes me ill when I think about the fact that I can't do anything substantial to stop it all.
One day, a number of years ago, I was thinking... about world religions, commonalities between people, and physics and thought... there's so much talk about energy being neither created nor destroyed and people discussing the power of prayer or spiritual energy or etc... and maybe that's all it's really about. Maybe it's all energy. And then there's the butterfly effect. The one thing I
can do is try every moment to put as much "good energy" or karma or whatever back into the world as possible.
[anecdotal aside: I was walking through the K-mart parking lot one day in my purple striped wellies because, duh, it was supposed to rain. Two girls, must have been late high-school, drove past, rolled down the window, and made a comment about what's up with my ugly-ass boots. I was in a pretty good funk for the next 4 hours. The funk was due to the mind-numbing effects of someone finding it necessary to instigate a drive-by-insulting over rain boots, not the insult itself. When I left work later, I passed another woman on the street who stopped momentarily and complimented me on my boots. This made me feel so much better, that I wanted to skip and thought "there is
some good in the world."]
Now, if a 30 second exchange can make me feel horrible for 4 hours and a 30 second exchange can also do the exact opposite, one thing I
can do to improve the lives of all these little people who live in the big city is to be nice. People don't seem to expect nice here, so it seems like it makes more of a difference. And maybe if it makes a difference, that person will also be nice and who knows but it could have a butterfly effect of varying scales. It's a nice thought anyway. Maybe it'll put some good in the world to counteract all the bad.
My challenge to myself and you all... hold the door for people, it'll only cost you 10 seconds. Hold the elevator for people, let someone merge in front of you, stop to let a pedestrian cross the road, smile at someone, compliment their shoes or hair, wave the other person through the intersection first even if you were there one second before them. Be nice to your servers, learn a piece of dollar-origami. If you get a nice server who seems to be having a shitty day, leave something fun as well as the tip. Everything that you do has a chance of making 30 seconds of someone else's shitty day nice or funny, which helps in the long-run I think.
