Recently, I came across this video:
The director had either secretly filmed my life, or the actress is my lost twin. If you ask anyone who's close to me, they will concur. Don't ask me why I would fall down on a flat road, or how I've gotten the many unknown bruises, or the number of times I've been locked out of my house for forgetting my keys. Most of these aren't really big problems; since I'm still alive and my limbs still intact. For most of my life, I've accepted that this is basically the story of my life. I've tried to reduced the number of times clumsiness creeped on me, and I think the frequency did reduce after these many years, they still happen from time to time. But after watching this video, I was inspired to really change this habit of mine.
The first time I looked at the video, I was just LOL-ing and saying "this is totally me." Then I immediately showed it to someone else, and while watching the video the second time, for some reason, I was noticing the people that were affected by her clumsiness - the people who got a shock from her actions, who are inconvenienced by her, the food that was wasted, the things that were broken, etc. That's also me. It made me recalled upon the many many times I'd been clumsy, and affected other people.
Just recently, I've accidentally brought a key to a storage room at the temple to Taiwan, and people couldn't access the storage room for 2 weeks. The other time, I forgot to bring my badge to work, and had to grab a temporary pass, but I had visitors coming to my company that day so I had to borrow a colleague's badge to bring my visitors around (because the temporary pass has limited access to some places). And times that I've forgotten that I'm living in a gated community and can't enter the gates after certain hours unless someone opens it up for me from the inside. These are just the tip of the many clumsy instances that have affected others. They are not super serious, but if I'm truly apologetic of my actions (which I am), I shouldn't let that happen in the first place.
A while ago, I had a very rare opportunity to speak to Venerable Hui Xuan, where he shared about the value of practicing mindfulness. It's important to have a daily practice of daily meditation, but it's even more important to bring this meditative mindfulness in our daily lives. A good way, he suggested, for a beginner to bring the practice in their lives is to start becoming more gentle in their actions. Because in order for a person to be gentle, they will need to be extra careful in their actions, and this is mindfulness practice.
Gentle and clumsy are basically antonyms. As you might have guessed, I'm definitely not a gentle person. But practicing gentle actions might be a good start for me to be more mindful and less clumsy with my actions. And I hope, I can apologize less for my clumsiness.