Sometimes I think people are spilling their cherries all over the sidewalk when really...

July was the start of berry season here in San Francisco. It's about the only thing that reminded me of summer here. Even on the foggy cold days, I would see people walking around chomping on their farmer's market purchases: blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and cherries. Delicious!

About a week or so into peak berry season, I started noticing people were spilling their cherries all over the ground in my neighborhood. I observed this more than a couple of times. "People! Hello! Stop dropping your cherries all over the sidewalk! ...Or at least pick them up like you would for anything else you spilled (SF is a pretty tidy city). They are getting trampled on and crushed into the cement and my shoes and can stain!"

I was on a run one morning in Golden Gate Park and I saw the same thing- cherries smashed all over the ground. There is NO WAY people are spilling their farmers market purchases here too! Barely anyone ever comes through this part of the park! So for some reason I decide to look up and notice there's a tree above all the cherries... with cherries on it. Yeah. Turns out there are lots of cherry trees all over The City, and the cherries just drop on the ground when they are ripe. I was wrong- people are not spilling their cherries and leaving them to get trampled on. Humbling moment.

Sometimes, we are so narrow minded and jump to conclusions and assume things (like that people are so inconsiderate that they drop their cherries on the ground and don't even bother to pick them up so that everyone steps on them and they stain everything) without looking at the bigger picture (it's a cherry tree). We are so focused on what's right in front of us (the ground full of crushed cherries) that we don't even see what's really going on (look up and see the tree).

Sometimes we blame too quickly or assume unrightfully and really just get ourselves into a lot of trouble. Sometimes we think we know what's going on and we convince ourselves we are right without knowing any more than a piece of the story. Sometimes you have to ask questions or look up in order to see the whole picture, or you risk making false conclusions and unfairly pointing fingers. All the time, it's good to be unassuming.