The SF homeless situation

I’ve been swamped and stressed with work all week. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up for 3 weeks and it’s been a rough last week. I’ve been pulling double digit workdays this week and my list of things to do is not getting any smaller.

Balancing work and personal life seems impossible at time, but sometimes you just need to take a step back, breathe, and realize that everything is going to be fine. I’m going to head up to Tahoe tomorrow to get my mind off things and use Sunday morning/afternoon to try to get caught up.

On to the next…

I wanted to write about the SF homeless problem, but from a different angle.

The situation is well documented and it does not take long on Twitter or on news sites to find people complaining about the problem. It is a bad situation that is getting worse and it needs to be addressed.

Perhaps I will write about that a different day, but this post is about empathy and human suffering that I felt compelled to write about.

I was on walk down Market Street yesterday as I was trying to clear my head yesterday. I was in a particular weird mood… I was stressed and absolutely exhausted. Things in my mind were not exactly rosy.

It didn’t take me long to really hunker down and focus on the immense human suffering happening on the streets of San Francisco. There was a homeless person living out of a cart, bag, or with absolutely nothing pretty much everywhere you turned.

It’s sometimes easy to write these people off and assume that this was self inflicted. On other the hand, we really don’t know anyone’s story. Abuse, neglect, and just downright shitty situations could and perhaps is even the likely story here.

As much as we like to deny this, we’re not that far off from these people. Some of us make the birth lottery. Some of us are born with more opportunity. Some of us are just lucky.

I was watching an elderly woman sit on her cart on Market yesterday. Her entire life was on this shopping cart and I noticed 2 bowls of instant ramen that was likely her only meals that day.

I don’t know how she got to this point or her story. The look on her face was something I’ll never forget. She just sat there. Gazing straight ahead. Minding her own business nearly emotionless.

I had this sinking gut feeling that she was just sitting there… waiting for death and her way out of this tough life. It was a look of pain and suffering I won’t ever get rid of in my mind.

I am very lucky to have the life I do. I hope the good fortunes continue, but I will remain grateful for everything I have today. Not many people are so lucky.