Whilst riding to work I came across an idyllic scene on the Humber trail: an older couple were feeding a chipmunk in the middle of the trail ahead of me. Now squirrels are nasty, bullying creatures, but I've never found chipmunks to be anything but charming. This is admittedly probably attributable to Disney's Chip an' Dale, but I digress. I slowed down my bicycle to smile at the couple as I passed them, and the chipmunk darted under my tires as I passed. Not through... under. Babump-babump. I was completely nauseated. The woman loudly burst into tears, and cowardly or not, I kept riding. I simply couldn't see a positive interaction happening, and I felt sick enough without facing blame. The man yelled after me, "You didn't have to kill it!" This cemented for me the futility of stopping.
Blame, though, is kind of interesting. I'm generally uninterested in blame and punishment and vengeance, looking more to solutions and preventative measures. Their first response, clearly, was to blame me. My first response was to feel ill, but my second response, upon feeling their blame, was to try to turn around the blame. After all, wasn't it really their fault? What were they thinking, feeding the chipmunk in the middle of the paved trail? My third response was to recognize that a panicky chipmunk had made a poor choice, and that none of the humans had been acting from villainy.
Next time, though, I might just stop my bike well clear of the chipmunk and walk for a while...
Excellent advice from Erica, and it made me laugh out loud.
There's supposed to be this litmus test of whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, right? It's based on whether you view a glass that's filled 50% as being half-full or half-empty. I've never been particularly concerned about quantity, though, so it all seems completely random and irrelevant to me. What I want to know is what's in the glass. Is it good? Will I like it? Is it mmmm or yuck? I think that makes me more qualitative than quantitative, if those are even words. They didn't get underlined, so I must be okay... although I'm a bit worried that I might be misusing "litmus test". I'm going to hit publish before I get all sidetracked looking up references...
I want so very badly to be a pessimist, or at the very least a realist. They're so much cooler than sissy optimists with their sunshine-and-roses outlook when everyone knows that the world is going to hell in a handbasket (whatever that means).
And yet, every single time I roll up the rim I am completely prepared for there to be a RAV4 under there. Every time.
Roll up the rim to lose is more like it...