Chasing Amy-Lou

1) People in general and by nature are not bad. People can be very kind, loving and generous. They can and will go out of their way for you for purely unselfish reasons, motivated by a desire to help out and to make others happy. Being kind and loving is the most natural thing in the world: love breeds love and hate is something that is manufactured and borne out of an inability to accept. Help is only a stones’ throw away when you surround yourself with the right people. The ‘Pay it Forward’ idea works well too – treat someone who is less fortunate with respect and kindness, and in return they must do the same to someone else once they find themselves in more fortunate circumstances. Brilliant concept!

2) All that said though, people can also be cruel. They can be mean, vindictive, untrustworthy and at times will stab you in the back to get ahead or to diminish your character for personal satisfaction and gain. This is no reflection on the kind of person you are, or I pertain to be; it is merely a reflection of the true colours and kind of person those affecting the cruelness are. One general piece of advice that a random stranger bestowed upon me about six weeks ago was this: Follow the rules of ABC and Avoid. Bad. Company. If your gut tells you a person is wrong, usually, your gut will be right.

3) There are a lot of people more fortunate and there are a lot of people less fortunate than you or I. This does not make them any less or any more worthy of your time or your attention. People come from different backgrounds. They make different choices. They take different paths. The paths they choose to follow may lead them to a life of shelter, of disinformation and of ignorance; of close mindedness and of bigotry; the paths they choose to follow may though, lead them to a life of openness, a life of knowledge, of acceptance and of curiosity (but not limited to this; the list goes on). If you treat everyone as an equal, no matter what their background or their present state of affairs, you will be a better person for it.

4) People make places. You can fall in love with a place, an area, a corner of the world. You can spend hours, days or weeks in a town or a city and love being there. Solitarily though, providing you aren’t a complete hermit who loves to be alone, it can get lonely. I have now found that it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, whether it be bumfuck middle of nowhere or in a thriving cosmopolitan metropolis, if you’re with the right people, then that place will take on a whole different level of meaning to you

5) People are still racist and still ignorant. This is just an unfortunate fact of life.

6) Mixing with people from different cultures, religions, backgrounds, social demographics, whatever, is probably more educational and eye opening than anything any school curriculum can teach you. If you live, work and socialise among people who are different from yourself, you can grasp an idea and concept of what it’s like to be in their shoes – you become more accepting of variety, change and difference.

7) People still steal, they still take drugs and they still lie. They still start fights, wars and conflict. This can only be eradicated if we choose peace over war; something John Lennon and many others have tried to advocate but have ultimately failed to achieve in the global sense of the idea.

8) People are capable of much more than they think they are. People are amazing, they are talented, they are beautiful, they are loving, they are caring and they are clever. Every person has a unique quality or attribute; some people just don’t know how to make these qualities shine. Everyone is capable of love and everyone is capable of being loved…you just have to allow yourself to believe, allow yourself to let go of your fears and it’s as easy as counting from one to ten.

9) People are fragile. Not everyone is as strong as an ox, able to take on the world and carry Atlas’s load on their shoulders, yet not everyone is weak. Sometimes, those who appear weak on the outside but because they have battled with their own problems internally, tend to be the strongest of all and can help others when they just might need it the most.

10) People are important. You will come across people in your life, whether it be for brief fleeting moments or whether it be encounters that last for decades, who will change and inspire you in a number of ways. Think what would’ve been if you hadn’t had that long conversation about transport woes and how shoddy mobile phone reception can be in the middle of the countryside? You might have saved yourself an hour in that day avoiding boring subjects with that weird redneck who was sipping tar-like coffee in that random desolate cafe, but you might have ended up stranded in the middle of nowhere not knowing how to get home or where to turn for assistance. That long conversation could’ve saved your bacon. More than that though, people can make you discover things about yourself. They help you grow and they help you to love. By being loving and trusting yourself, you can attract wonderful things to your life (as long as you remain savvy and not too naïve or vulnerable). Like attracts like, good people attract good people, and positives generally attract positives.

11) People, wherever they are from, whatever their background or place in this world, are ultimately the same – we are all striving for the same thing; reaching and aiming for the same goals in life. Don’t overlook a person’s search for clarification in selfish pursuit of your own, for that person you chose to overlook may just be the one person who is able to help you on the long and bumpy road to happiness.