Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Broken glass everywhere


Ichigo was curiously exploring the glass vase on top of the refrigerator. He accidentally knocked it over, and broken glass scattered all over the kitchen. Nini was jarred awake from the top of the couch and ran over my face and chest as I lied there, scratching me to the point of bleeding. I sat up and stayed there quietly for a few minutes thinking calmly about what just happened. I went to the bathroom and checked and washed the cuts on my lip and my chest. Then I swept the kitchen floor. Finally, I smiled a mischievous smile at the kittens.

I wasn't mad at them because it all started with curiosity, which is a trait I admire and encourage. Of course, accidents happen, and fear is just another one of them. The result of fear can be violent or destructive, like the cuts on my body. Again, I almost instantly traced the chain of cause and effect back to curiosity and defused the potential anger or blame I could've felt.

Why don't I do that when people are involved? Somehow, I assume that people can be malicious inherently, that they are not merely hapless carriers of an infectious disease that happened to hit me. How useless a thought, this attribution of evil! The attribution itself is the evil that generates all the madness in my world and the world at large. If most of us would stop blaming others, it would be like a vaccine creating herd immunity against the virus of anger. The isolated outbursts of anger would simply dissipate as there aren't enough people around with the propensity to propagate it.

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