Cloudy Perception and Inherent Goodness

Fridays are, by all counts, my favourite day of the week.  Not only do I begin my weekend, where inevitably I will do very little but enjoy it greatly, but there's a nice sense of finality to the week that allows me to feel accomplished.  Whether that sense of accomplishment stems from a job well done, or as in the case of this week, merely surviving the five days since my last reprieve, it's always lovely to look back and realize that, like it or not, there's a new week coming.  I enjoy that sense of rebirth that happens very late on Sunday night, as I crawl into bed and start to plan the week ahead.

My day started out quite regularly, and nice as it was to be predictable, it felt somewhat mundane.

My first patient changed everything.  You see, sometimes I get so stuck in the appearances of the things I see that I forget that my perception can be skewed.  The woman who presented herself to me - bright and early, I might add - was in earlier this week to place her order.  I diligently did the job quickly because it was easy and I had nothing better to do at the time.  Now, this woman is not indicative of our typical clientele (which, more often are upper-middle class or affluent citizens of the world; numerous addresses in our database are international) and I made the first-glance (mis)judgement that she would be a handful, or so over-the-top as to be unbearable.

Not only was she fabulously kind and sweet, she was also very appreciative of what we'd done for her - more so than I've ever seen a patient be.  The gratitude she expressed was incredible, and she was so genuinely kind and warm that for a while, I almost hoped she'd stick around longer.

The thing is, my judgement of her - my very skewed perception of this variation in our clientele - was to assume that she was (excuse me for saying this) ghetto-trash.

I have a keen ghetto-radar because, as I am quite proud to admit, I am a former ghetto-dweller.  Ok, fine, I have no snazzy sense of street talk, nor do I particularly enjoy things like road hockey, however after years of living in those sorts of neighborhoods (the ones you don't actually tell people you live in for fear of being blacklisted) I do have a pretty good eye for these things.

All too often, I can spot the telltale signs of poverty (the ones that those who have nothing are equally well-trained in hiding) from a mile away, and though it makes me terribly sad, I also think about what sorts of obstacles they have to overcome.  The horrendous lack of viable social programming, affordable education, and of course lack of money are all further hardening their struggle.

The fact of the matter is, this woman who had very few material possessions to speak of (as she didn't hesitate to discuss with me) had a radiating kindness within her that overshadowed her somewhat slanted view of reality.  In her eyes, there was something about us that made us 'better' than her - she'd said as much while we were chatting away - and for a moment I wanted to kick myself because, when she'd approached me earlier, I had a fleeting momentary thought that I was somehow better than her.

At the end of our fitting, she smiled kindly, thanked me emphatically, and then stopped to tell me a bit more about her goings-on.  It was refreshing to have such an exuberant explanation of how she perceived the world around her, and in a way to be reminded that the circumstances in which one lives is not defining of a person's worth, nor is it indicative of their value in the community.

I left my ghetto quite a while ago, and for a long time I was trying to change it for something better - to learn to see a different view of what I always hated - but maybe what I should have been doing all along was trying to focus my perception on the inherent goodness that lives in all sorts of communities, in various economic standings, and across socio-economic terms.

I'm grateful for that woman for starting my day in such a way as to make me question the notions I otherwise took for 'solid' and for letting me see a little of the world from her view - try as I may to be a good person, it takes someone like her to remind me that there's no such thing as better, just worse.