Street Connection

On Saturday I had been at lunch on the Southbank in London. I walked back across the bridge and went to the post office to send postcards (even the odd poster!) and as I exited I saw a bright man sitting in a doorway begging for money for a flight back to Canada. I stopped and said: "Tell me your story"

He was, if anything, a story teller. In a much summarised version he says: he is embroiledvery deeply in a conspiracy involving a diamond company and as a result two people called Jack and Sheila are out to kill him. The thing that strikes me in retrospect is that he is wholly caught up in the act of revenge, the anger of the injustice. When I ask what he exposed these two individuals for, why they have destroyed his life, he wheels it back round to the fact they are just bad people who hate and bully and are going to hell.

I don't see the story. I see a bright, beautiful, intelligent capable man who is trapped on the other side of a thick glass wall. He is suffocating himself with the idea of anger. I watch it dance between us and see that all I can do is keep connecting him with the fact that there is something other than this anger. There is an escape route for him, a way away from both the phantoms of his mind and the reality of his homeless situation. It is the present moment. When he connects with it during our 40 minute conversation it causes him deep pain (he cries) but there is also in his eyes a recognition of the light after the darkness. He sees that he could indeed help others move on from substance abuse, that he could just start by volunteering to allow others to be free, that he is in fact totally capable of leaving the situation of the street behind him.

After watching him sit with the light for a little while I left.

He has given me a phone number for him. I messaged him good luck. He called me. He was back in the dark place and again I just listened. This man is so desperate to hold on to the anger that he wants to just rail against it with someone listening. I don't hear that, I hear the man behind and wonder if he will ever find himself.

• I wonder how much these connections really help?
• And how much is possible by offering time in this way?
• How much more might be possible if one could just walk the earth being attached to nothing and only giving what was needed, receiving what was needed, offering it up to the moment?