The man who changed my day:
Stumbling old man, with overgrown light blonde beard with hints of rust, snot accumulating on his mustache. Tattered jacket with dirt smudged sweater underneath. Ripped jeans, with black tennis shoes with Velcro.
“I’ve been great until now”
“I moved into a new place and it stinks. Well it doesn’t stink the people do.”
“People are like assholes – everyone has them and they all stink”
(walks away…then comes back 15mins later)
“You took these pictures?”
“I used to take pictures, when I was in my twenties.”
“Where are these?”
“I ate fish soup twice a day at gunpoint for three years”
“I was shot down over Cambodia.”
“I was a helicopter pilot, fighting in Vietnam.”
“The beat me everyday, knocked my teeth out, I have a metal plate in my skull, and replaced knees”
“They pissed and shit on me everyday.”
“When I got back I wanted to piss and shit on the President”
This let me to realizations: that the keys to solving many of our present problems are forged in the past. so many of us are conditioned by habit, fearing that we are stuck someplace we can never get out of and always a victim of reality. Really, - we create our own prisons cast out of our own judgments – creating these cells we choose to live in, or choose not to. Some things that happen may lie beyond our power of control, but we determine how to view the situation, and it is never beyond our power to heal and be at peace.