"Who Is The Slayer, Who Is The Victim, Speak."

I was amazed at the hustle and bustle of a Monday in our not-so-wee city today as I tried to accomplish some errands with the dying embers of my second cold in four months.  Drivers were not nice and one woman tailgating me off the freeway was yelling at me for being in front of her.  Or so I guessed.  I saw so much ugliness out there that I could not wait to come home and watch a movie with the dogs slumbering nearby.

Having a cold has its own cadence and today I felt better than I have in a week. However, the anger of people driving and customers in stores where I went, treating one another with a callousness that might otherwise seem standard was enough for me to think I needed a helmet to be out amongst them.   Thankfully I could just come home.

For me, at this juncture in life, I try to breathe in the difficulty of loss and pain and breathe out love, compassion and a greater understanding how we could try much harder with one another.  I remembered a quote my mother had cut out from a wonderful book of photography called The Family Of Man which asked, "Who Is The Slayer, Who Is The Victim, Speak?"

In less poetic language, we are all family and kindness toward our fellow travelers may be all that separates our life experiences.