As I walked to work, I stepped over the every familiar Snail crossing the pavement. I usually give them a hand and move them in the direction they are travelling and out of footfalls way, but today I stepped over him and left him take his chances.

As I walked on, I caught myself saying ‘nothing has changed for me by helping them in the past, why do I keep bothering anyway?’

That’s when it dawned on me that the snail shouldn’t pay the price for what was actually someone else’s shortcomings. Just because my thoughts were preoccupied with a grievance with someone from the previous day, I was making the snail pay the price for this persons misdemeanour’s! I compromised my values in a ‘poor me’ moment and made the snail the scape goat.

So next time you find you are shouting at your nearest and dearest, slamming doors or trying to kick the dog for being a dog, ask yourself what’s at the root of this emotional retort. Chances are its nothing to do with the person, animal or thing you are attacking.

Also who’s to say nothing good had happened as a result of my previous ‘snail air lifts’.

It just may not have come in the form I recognised. Who knows, I may have been pencilled in to be run over by a car just before I moved the ‘slippery risk takers!’

It’s not always what we have that matters as much as perhaps what we have been spared from, that we often forget to appreciate.