A friend of mine was waiting at an airport one night with several long hours before her flight. She hunted for a book in the airport shops, bought a bag of cookies and eventually found a place to sit and wait for her flight.
She began reading and was soon engrossed in her book, but happened to see that the man sitting beside her, as bold as could be grabbing a cookie from the bag resting between their two seats. Attempting to avoid making a scene she decided to ignore him.
So, she munched on a couple of the cookies and each time she looked up from her book the gutsy cookie thief was again diminishing her stock! She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by, thinking to herself “If I wasn't so nice, I would blacken his eye.”
With each cookie she took he took one too, until there was only one left. She wondered what he would do. With a smile on his face, and a nervous laugh, he took the last cookie and broke it in half.
He offered her half, as he ate the other, she snatched it from him and thought “oooh, brother! This guy has some nerve! He's so rude- he didn't even show any gratitude!!”
She could not remember being so annoyed, and sighed with relief when her flight was called. She thrust her book into her purse and headed to the gate, refusing to look back at the thieving cookie bandit.
She boarded the plane, and sank in her seat, and looked into her purse for her book which was almost completed. As she reached in her purse, she gasped with surprise- there in front of her eyes was an unopened bag of cookies.
She said to herself- “If mine are in here, then the others must have been his.” Too late to apologize, she realized that she was the rude one, the ungrateful one, the thief.
perspective and hindsight are precious commodities. We can all become so wrapped up in our lives that we forget that there are two sides to every story, and as Aesop's fable says, ‘every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both before we commit ourselves to either'. Perhaps today we might all take a moment to consider the perspectives of others on our own actions. Perhaps we ought to try looking at ourselves and our actions from someone else's perspective? Perhaps we owe someone an apology? Perhaps we will be brave enough to do something about it.
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