May 30, 2012
The Squeaky Wheel
A shopping cart with defective wheels drives me nuts. I usually grab a
cart, take a few steps with it and then turn around and swap it for one that
rolls smoothly and doesn’t carry on a conversation with itself. If I have to
settle for a noisy cart, by the time I’m finished shopping I have a really bad
attitude - I’m mad at the store, the clerks and the other shoppers. Recently a
friend told me that she really doesn’t mind a cart with a squeaky wheel, “I look at it like this, people can hear me
coming and they get out of my way.” The next time I went to the store I
decided to give her outlook a try. She was right. Even people standing in the
middle of the aisle who were oblivious to other shoppers heard me coming and
gave me a wide berth. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. I also found that
I connected with fellow shoppers, even if it were simply a sympathetic look of,
‘you poor dear, I understand your pain.’
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----What a valuable observation! I grew up with the misunderstanding that people were automatically aware of my presence and the small assortment of my needs thereof. I didn’t expect people to part for me like the Red Sea, and I certainly didn’t want that, either. But I did expect them to know where my toe was and at least to give me a chance for moving it if they needed to step there. The unnervingly common reoccurrence of their failure to do so led me to believe nobody cared about me. Poor me! So my misunderstanding about the nature of awareness began farming bad attitudes towards people.
-----I never wanted to be a noisy person. In spite of my desires and efforts to be conscientious of whom my actions might effect, I knew better than anyone how greatly I failed at it. This, plus other rattling bones in my closet, kept my ambition set upon being quiet and unnoticeable. You think I would have put two and two together! But rather, I grew to like the obscurity it took to keep my toes healthy and my past unknown. For a few years in the early eighties I even referred to myself mentally as a city hermit.
-----I still don’t want to be a noisy person. I’m not a whole lot better at pleasing my neighbors now than I was then. And although I have rebuilt good attitudes towards others around the fundamentals of forgiveness, compassion, and admiration, my culpability in life’s threat to my toes never dawned on me until I read about your squeaky carts. I think I will now spend some time summing up those rattley bones, what noise might be respectful, and where the line might be between making it for the safety of my toes and the pleasure of my neighbors, or for making it just to be noticed. When I learn that line, I might actually become a little more beneficial to the Lord.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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