Lucky

Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, wrote another book prior to The Lovely Bones called Lucky. It's a memoir recounting her brutal rape when she was a college student. The title came from the police telling her she'd been "lucky" because another girl had been murdered and dismembered in the same location where she had been raped. Albert Einstein taught us all things are relative (y'know that theory of relativity thing) so I guess in that context she was "lucky".

I don't know if I'm ready yet to consider incurring a broken shoulder lucky but it has afforded me time to think about a lot of stuff from my life and what I'm supposed to be doing with it, to who my friends are (now that's been a real eye opener!) to who exactly thought screw off caps were a good idea, cuz I can tell you they ain't so easy to open one-handed.

I've worked very hard in my life not to be judgemental. Frankly, that's a real challenge for me. I've never had much of a problem not judging people on the inane stuff most humans fight about like skin color or cultural origins or sexual orientation or whose God is better. Quite honestly that stuff just pisses me off because it's such a waste of time. It's like judging the quality of the Thanksgiving dinner based on the color of the table cloth. Ridiculous.

Where I get hung up is when people fail to help each other when they can and choose not to. T.B. Macaulay once said, "The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out." When we do things for others because we believe someone else will see and think us, therefore, to be a good person or to have done a good thing, I don't think it counts toward our karma brownie points. In fact, it may do just the opposite. But when we do something just because we believe it to be the right thing or to help someone just because we can then I think that is the measure of true integrity.

My broken shoulder has afforded me the opportunity to observe high levels of integrity in people I would have previously thought devoid of any. And therefore it has helped me to ease up on myself and others when I find myself feeling judgemental. So maybe in that context my broken shoulder has been a little bit "lucky".