This Tuesday I went to Goulburn to do a home visit in an aboriginal family on my own. It didn’t turn out terribly perfect as the only adult in this family forgot about this appointment, regardless that I had rung her three times before I went over.

To be honest, I sort of knew this was going to happen, as from my past experience of dealing with aboriginal families, I figured it out that they actually have very unstructured life which makes everything just so hard to predict. In order to avoid this, I rang in the morning prior to the appointment, but…..what happened? They still forgot.

I suppose that after having travelled almost half way to Sydney and put lots of my work on hold to allow this appointment to happen, I could have been more annoyed and crankier if this is the first time. But I wasn’t, even though I had to speak to her two daughters with a screen door in between. On the opposite, I felt quite blessed…it’s better than talking to a closed door, isn’t it?

On this Thursday I spent a couple of hours in the afternoon at the Queanbeyan Youth Centre doing an Expo for the Youth Week. Again, I was on my own. For the time being over there, there were quite a lots of kids coming up, but I didn’t see any kids who have genuine interest in the information. They just want to have fun and a good time. Can you blame that?

As a result of that, my promotional bags and pens were all gone in a flash, but my brochures and handbooks. Kids are really funny people. They normally don’t realise who they are dealing with and how lousy their lies are. There was a boy who had taken more than 3 bags and pens at a time and still came back saying that he wanted more because he will give them to his grandmother and mother. Well, which grandmother or mom would carry a bright green nylon backpack?

I could have laughed out. But instead of that, I just smiled at him and said “go ahead and help yourself…” It’s not that I didn’t care, it’s just that I had learned that sometimes I need to allow myself to lose the control over the things that I want to control, have lower expectation towards other people, or simply just let it be.

Sometimes when I look back, I am actually surprised by how much I had submitted to the reality in my daily life. However, I am also equally surprised by how much I could have let it go by not insisting and pressing too hard (even though I am not so much a control freak).

I am like many others, had the time that I decided to be a nuts and give somebody else a hard time. But every time I did it, I regretted and felt really not worthwhile.

The hard feelings won’t go away and that’s the price for our own narrowness. Pointing out other people’s faults and mistakes, had never ever made me a smarter person. It takes me no where but makes me look like a grumpy whinger.

I had learned….and I felt the urge to take some time to reflect what’s all this about and what sort of person I want to be. There are so many different ways to look at the world, but I only wished I had the eyes to see the goodness.