Several Good Reasons to Be Grateful for Being Attacked on the Street

Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
-- James Thurber

My life in slow motion, let's wind it back.

It's 1 AM in the night of Kuala Lumpur. A girl and a guy are walking on the street, absorbed in a conversation to catch a taxi to a birthday party. Yes, it's me and Andries, a wonderful person who has become a good friend of mine, visiting me in KL. We're walking and talking - and suddenly surrounded by around 8 guys on motorbikes.

This is when the slow motion gets switched on.

They're aggressive and in a rush to take everything we have. We don't have much - a mobile, an iPod, a few hundred ringgits, keys to my house, a lipstick (wonder what they did with that?:). Being part of this scene seems a bit unreal - Andries on the ground, taser flashing in the night (and you hope they don't hurt your friend), me pushed around, someone shouting: "Shut up!" (did I say anything? Slow motion...).

And then it's over.

You hear the cars driving on the main street again, see the houses nearby and life gets back in the rhytm as you know it. A hug from a friend connects that moment with gratitude and connection.

So today it's a lucky girl writing here. Seeing the dark side of life certainly makes you value more the bright side. The best thing to take with us are the lessons, so here you have mine from a negative situation out of your control:

1. Forgive. There's always two (or more) sides of the story, don't get stuck with yours. Seeing the other person might sometimes take a bit, but in the end of the day forgiving is the only way to love and healing. I guess these kids had their reasons for ending up with this life style, I just don't know the story and was a very random episode in theirs.

2. Forget. No negative energy from other people should bitter us nor make fearful. It just doesn't make sense to double the harm by becoming a more negative person yourself. In the end - it's nothing personal and it's not your problem either. If you can't do anything about it - stop worrying about it and move on.

3. Prepare. Don't lose the lesson. Make sure the next difficulty that crosses your way meets a better prepared you. I start from asking how to avoid the same situation in the future - using taxi to move around after dark seems like a nice idea.

4. Love your people. I think this is the most important lesson. It's a thought from mother Teresa that Andries shared with me when we sorted the things out in a conversation. Loving the world starts from loving the people close to you. If you don't love your family first, then how can you love your employees, community, society, the world? Mother Teresa called it the Hierarchy of Love - love flows from close, healthy relationsships and heals the world. So I don't intend to change the life of all the bittered, unhappy youngsters attacking people on streets - but make sure I have enough love for My People first.

I'm fully grateful for getting to know different sides of life and growing in the process. We should never judge, but learn to understand. We should never build negative energy in ourselves. And we definitely should have as much fun as we can - life's such a wonderful thing, every day's a gift.