Magpie watch; and the kindness of others

Feared by all cyclists; Maggie

A buddhist teacher recently told me a story about a monk from Tibet who was visiting London. Walking through the city he would constantly stop and look up, or around, and say, “How kind!” and then keep walking.After a little while his amused (and probably impatient) minders pulled him up and said, “Ok, what is it that you’re looking at and why do you keep stopping?”

Buddhist monk says, “That light-post on the street – someone put that there so people can see at night, how kind!

And our monk goes on to exclaim how kind it was that someone had bothered to paste up a train timetable at the station so we knew what time a train would leave, how kind it was that someone put a letterbox in the street so we could just pop our mail in it, and so on.

Obviously our monk was from Tibet and this is a great anthropological experiment in practice. But the point is about the attitude or perspective we view the world from. Sure we pay rates so we goddamn expect the person who was paid to erect a lamp post in the street to do so.

But, it is also unquestionably kind, for someone out there to think about how that lamp post will stop us from tripping over when we’re walking home at night.

Don’t tell me spikes don’t work!

Today I web-surfed my way onto a page that is a great example of kindness by and for cyclists in Sydney.

Magpie Watch

How kind that cyclists are looking out for each other and pasting the locations of territorial Spring magpies onto a google map. And how very, very handy! Thankfully there’s only one dive bombing maggie in Bondi.