… can make a hard situation easy, or make an easy situation hard.
To enter the shelter, you walk across this parking lot to an iron gate, and then down these steps to the “smoke pit,” an 8 x 20′ area with benches where we sit until they call us in, in groups of six, to register for this night. One does this every day.
Sunday 07/01/12 about ten of us were sitting in the smoke pit when Perry saw Fallon at the top of the stairs. Talking into the air, Perry said: “Every day, it’s ‘Why am I coming in here?’ It’s ‘cuz you’ve got no place else to go.”
Fallon sat down and said, “Why am I coming in here?”
Fallon doesn’t say much, but what he does say is full of complaints about the shelter. He never speculates about how he might improve his situation. I first saw him a month or two ago, but from his knowledge of the inner workings of the mission, it’s clear he’s been coming here for years.
Years.
Attitude can make a hard situation easy, or an easy situation hard.
I rarely think about the fact I’m homeless.[*] I think about marketing The William Tell Show, other ways I might find work, or good things I can do at church. Seems to me this makes my situation easier — for me, and possibly everyone around me, too.
[*] In part this reflects the specific shelter that I’m in; about which, more in a later post.
(Originally posted 2012-07-02 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reblogged 2014-04-16.)
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