You are never too busy to be polite and have good manners.
Or are you, and if you are should others make allowances for your bad behavior?
We live in a hurry, scurry kind of world, we are all busy, sometimes stressed and our minds are taken up with everyday things in our lives. Without even knowing it we are apt to confuse, upset, ignore, or event worse, people in our daily lives, and not mean too.
Today I was rushing around after a presentation, then a meeting, then I had some personal business to attend to before I hurried off to Zehrs my local grocery store. I was in a great mood, in a hurry and quite tired. But, as I turned the corner ready to move into the next aisle a shopping cart came running towards me at full speed driven by an elderly lady. She was well dressed, business casual, in a hurry, but not caring who she ran over in her quest to reach the checkout. As she charged into me, I jumped out of the way apologised, but not sure what for, and fully expected her to at least say she was sorry, but nothing was forthcoming.
I carried on knowing that I had acted in accordance to my principles and happily waited in line to be served at the fresh meat counter before moving on to the checkout. This was also a slow process but I checked my iPhone for emails and waited my turn patiently.
As I walked out into the mall I noticed the lady who had ran into me with her shopping cart sitting on a bench, no longer in a hurry.She was alone, looking quite sad and thoughtful and I realised she probably did not even know she had ran into me, she was in a world of her own and she seemed, to me to be a lonely person sitting there.
If I was a different person I might have shouted at her for being rude to me, and maybe added to her already full shopping cart of worries, challenges, whatever it was she was dealing with.
My day was not spoilt by this incident, my day still turned out to be a great day and I was happy that I was not sitting on a bench all alone with the world on my shoulders.
The world would be a better place if we could make allowances for other people, if not all of the time but some of the time.