ACTION AND REACTION

“Faith! Take care of yourself!! Take very good care of yourself!! Take care of yourself!! How many times have I said this?” said the old lady that sleeps at the TBS-BRT terminal to me.

She told me about her husband, children, the amazing places she had visited, her life as a real estate manager, her religious beliefs and "political opinions."

While I sat there... partly intimidated by her diction but for the most part, impressed.

“I’m not a mad woman! I’m not poor either. 

I’ve been here for 10 months, sleeping on these streets not because I do not have a choice but because I am tired. 

I am tired of all the hate around me. 

Even my children turned against me and one another all because of my wealth. 

I am heartbroken”.

My heart bled as she spoke but a part of my mind kept whispering 

“she’s probably just crazy and making this up, you better be careful before you get some incurable disease or something.”

The Mariam Webster dictionary defines science as the 

“knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation."

 

Science has many "laws" and one of them is the law of ACTION AND REACTION.

This law states that action and reaction are equal and opposite.

A seed of positivity should yield positivity.

Give love and you will be loved.

Give respect and you will be respected, right?

This isn’t always the case in the world we find ourselves. 

This is why a lot of scientific principles only apply in specified conditions. 

Like a vacuum, zero gravity. 

Or the omission of any and every unforeseen circumstance that results from the eccentricity of the human nature.

I used to always believe that people’s actions to me were a mirror image of mine to them but life has painfully proven me and my naïve hypothesis wrong. 

I have sown love into people’s lives and gotten pain and betrayal back. 

I’ve given attention and gotten rejection. 

I’ve sown respect and been disrespected and disgraced.

Humans are unpredictable.  

We constantly battle the demons in our heads and sometimes we battle our angels as well... 

when they suggest that we perform a selfless act that we normally would not. 

We lose these battles sometimes and there are always repercussions, good or bad.

In the end, the only things I think should matter are the lives we touched, positively or negatively.  

The ones we loved or didn’t love.

The memories we documented in photographs. 

The friendships and relationships we found worthy enough to fight for 

And lastly, ourselves.

Dear reader, take care of yourself and be good to others, not for their appreciation but for yourself. 

Update: I should write more. 

Thanks for reading, please comment your opinions and suggestions and I’ll be sure to get back to you if need be.