M&M's

His oval-shaped, chocolate colored eyes stared longingly as the red M&M rolled down the subway floor. He looked at his mother and then back at the small piece of candy that had escaped from his tiny hands. You could almost see the wheels in his head turning. He realized what he had lost and within seconds he began whaling. His mother handed him another one from the yellow bag but he was still crying. He didn't want a new one, he wanted the one he had lost. A few minutes later his little mind had forgotten about the loss and he was back to sucking contently on another M&M, this time a green one that left spit trickling out of his mouth and down the cocoa colored skin of his face. He finished the candy and was given a bottle. He was asleep within seconds regardless of the noise around him and the constant hustling of people getting on and off of the subway.

He was brand new. A blank slate. His biggest worry for a brief moment was the loss of a red M&M.

There was a couple sitting directly across from him. They had gotten on the train in a hurry, squeezing through the doors as they were about to close, carrying an enormous amount of shopping bags. The bags were from Victoria's Secret, Macy's, Best Buy, the Gap and so on. The bags seemed endless and they were filled with stuff. The man spent the entire ride examining his purchases one by one. There were hundreds of dollars worth of Christmas presents in them. The man was wearing a gold chain and a large square gold ring encrusted with diamonds. I laughed to myself because he was the polar opposite of my image of Santa Claus yet he had bought out entire stores it seemed. He took out the ipods and the gadgets he had bought, playing with them and hardly listening as his wife talked about things that did not have to do with the gifts in the bags. It seemed as though she was carrying on one conversation while he was in an entirely different world, mesmerized by material things.

These people did not have blank slates. I wondered if they were well off or if they just had a lot of credit card debt. I wondered if they were happy. I wondered what they had done to tarnish their lives. We all have tarnished lives. We all have marks on our slate. We all make mistakes. Some are irreversible and some are unforgivable. Some are just mistakes though, ones that can be mended with time and effort. Some get us to where we need to go, and some force us to be the people we were meant to be.

The connection between the sleeping child and the couple with the enormous shopping bags was this and only this; they were all human. They had all been born with a clean slate, a chance to live their lives in an honorable way. Nothing is perfect, and we all do the best we can in this world.

Sometimes I just wonder if we paused more often and just enjoyed something as simple as a green M&M if maybe our mistakes wouldn't seem so huge, and our lives might seem a little easier to bear. It would just be a moment and it would by no means give us back the blank slates that we were born with. It would be an effort to stand still for a moment and let the world fall away. It might not be a piece of candy but there are things for all of us as individuals that bring us back to the basics of life. Peace washes over us and we may even fall asleep doing exactly what we love to do.