Wayward Furniture and Impulse Control in Everyday Ramblings

We’ll see if this works. The picture came through sized small and I don’t know why. I took this on a local walk a few days ago. The chair is no longer there. This morning walking down to the clinic for some blood work I walked by a 1930’s toilet sitting on a corner.

Last week someone dumped a piece of a beige sectional sofa and a long pillow in a green case in the ivy of the parking meridian right in front of my kitchen window. It got rained on. Yesterday a guy in a truck parked the wrong way in front of it and muscled it in the back and drove away.

It is a stunningly beautiful cool fall day here. I am getting my hair cut later and that involves a bus ride and a 15-minute walk. I am looking forward to being out again.

I continue to think about the people with animals in the flooding in the Carolinas. I saw this picture yesterday, I think on the web version of the Weather Channel, of this older man wearing nothing but blue shorts (no shoes) sitting on the roof of his white truck with a disabled tag on the mirror completely surrounded by water cradling his dog.

He had nothing. Just his shorts and his dog.

A mayor said that animals couldn’t go to with their people to shelters unless they had proof of rabies shots and I ask myself who is going to think to grab that when the evacuation order comes? I am so sad that so many of us are learning all this as a skill. That it is something we need to get better at.

We are so very vulnerable. And so fiercely independent. I know I find it a challenge to understand and be graceful on some deep level that we need each other and we must take care of each other.

I heard an interview with a Baptist elder marshaling the parisioners available from their church to go out and offer to help folks and he was reminding them that the important thing was to let the people they interacted with know that they are not alone.

Yesterday when I was walking home from class I walked by a young man, not indigent, healthy looking, lying on the sidewalk next to the PSU Art Building with a few things next to him with his hands thrown over his head and his legs in this weird akimbo position and I literally did not know what to do. I looked across the street where there are usually transit police but none were in sight.

A few weeks ago I came across two men calling 911 about a well heeled man slumped on a bench, I offered to call the Clean and Safe folks as I have them in my phone but I was just flummoxed about what to do about the young man last night.

Last Wednesday as I was walking to class it was drizzling a bit and I came across an older person, I honestly don’t know if it was a man or a woman sitting on a concrete wall wrapped in a blanket with their shoes off. They had a seriously old person’s hoary feet with the long nails curling in. That just broke my heart. I stopped and asked if I could give that person some money and I did.

We need each other. That is all there is to it.

Each encounter is different. Sometimes we know what to do and sometimes we don’t. A Buddhist teacher I admire says listen to your impulses, trust them and act on them right away and let it go.

I try to practice this but I tell you it was really hard to walk away from that young man without doing something.

Another one of my students came to class last night recovering from a concussion, a bad one… after she fell. I think we need to have training in this! She told me after that she has always driven herself pretty hard in yoga (and has the damaged shoulders to prove it) and is realizing that the slower gentler way I teach has real benefits.

I told her that she had just made my day saying that!

So slow down you overachievers out there and trust your impulses when it comes to helping others and now I am going to find some worthy animal rescue organization in North Carolina to donate to.

Last updated September 20, 2018