Someone once said to me that it is easy to love nice and good people but not so easy to love those who challenge you, who disappoint you, who make you angry. Intentional hurting is a matter of debate, therefore subjective enough to call for individual assessment if at all possible and solvable. The only question that comes to mind is whether the people who disappoint and anger us are worthy enough to warrant acceptance? The good ones, they love you right back without shaking, or, God forbid, destroying any images of them you have build in your mind. Because come on, it must’ve happened to you too, believing someone to be of a certain texture, personality-wise, just to be confronted, later on, with the real person stipped of any appearances. Just like I am not the only one who walked straight into a way-too-perfect mirror image of myself just to shatter it to pieces and get hurt by them. And make enough shards to hurt others.

Life is never perfect and people are even further away from perfection. What then? How deep can someone’s matter-of-factly acceptance of people can run? What does it mean to see people for what they are and then accept them for all that they are and for all that they’re not? What good is in that anyway? Do we become better people because we show our Good Samaritan side every now and then while bestowing our graces onto mere mortals? We do, most likely, whether noticeable or not, but that should not be the driving force behind it. Life is not about collecting laurels, at least that’s not what I think of it. Life is about living, knowing people, finding out what they are made of and most of all, discovering that they are human. Faults and all. And when you accept people, the real, non-fabricated version, the ones that come with all that’s good, bad, stinky, questionable yet also with that grain of worthiness which might be hard to see when egos get in the way, that’s when we accept and see life for what it is: a gift, the greatest gift of all, the gift from which everything else grows.