Hey! Is there something on your shoe?

By Dr. Marlo Archer

Ah, Spring! The birds are chirping, wildflowers are blooming, and the weather is so perfect for a walk outside with a friend. People take to the streets, to the dog parks and hiking trails to enjoy fellowship and joyful movement out among the beauty of nature.

Then it happens… you place your foot down and it slides ever so slightly, like there might be a little bit of wet mud under your foot. But it hasn’t rained in days, so you rule that out while you take your next step which lands securely on solid ground and you wonder, for a moment, if it was just your imagination. When you step that first foot down again and feel the squish tells you it is definitely tied to your right foot, but not your left. Weird.

As you set your left foot down easily again, the aroma hits you! You realize that you are now dragging some sort of animal dooo along as you trek merrily along. Ewwww! You want it off your shoe immediately, so you stop walking and try to wipe it off, looking like a bull getting ready to charge a matador. If you’re fortunate to be around grass, the offending material might wipe easily away, but more likely, in a desert, the dry dust has done little to get the stuff off your shoe.

You find a rock and try to scrape your foot on the rock, but the angle isn’t right and you have to pick up the rock, then lift up your foot and try to use the rock as a scraper, but then, you get an ever so small amount of the goop on the side of your hand and you almost scream and shudder, so you nearly drop the rock and splatter the mess even further.

To get a hold of the situation, you simply must calm yourself, look around, and see what might wipe your hand without causing further damage. You carefully wipe it off with a small piece of cloth you can ball up and either throw away or bag for later laundering. With your redeemed hand, you can return to ridding your shoe of the remainder of muck.

With that task complete, you now have several options: grump along for the next few minutes trying to figure out who to blame for the mess, post your misfortune to social media, continue the walk as if nothing unpleasant happened, vow to write to a politician to fix this problem, go back and at least clean up the portion you dragged along for several paces, or go back and clean up the whole mess or at least block off the area so others won’t make the same mistake.

Grumping Doesn’t Raise Awareness

Some of us are pretty good at grumping and hoping that raising awareness will fix things. Others among us are great at just pretending nothing happened and hoping it won’t happen again. However, how many of us really take the time to do something that might work to protect ourselves and others from the same misfortune? We tell ourselves: “Writing to elected officials won’t do anything, so why bother?” We assert that it’s not our fault we spread the mess since we wouldn’t have it if wasn’t there in the first place. We rationalize that since no one protected us from this humiliation, we’ve no responsibility to save anyone else, besides, it’s their job to watch where they’re walking anyhow.

What if we replace doggie doo with some other menace like domestic violence, addiction, lying, cheating, or stealing?

If we ignore these issues, isn’t it like dragging them around on the bottom of our shoes? If we merely extricate ourselves from the damage caused to us directly and expect everyone else to fend for themselves, doesn’t that end up hurting us all? If we merely grump about these problems, but do nothing to assist, doesn’t that continue to dirty up our social environment?

These tough issues, much like piles in the park, won’t go away on their own and merely side-stepping them may be your good fortune for a long time, but wouldn’t it be better if we all just helped clean up no matter who started all the mess?