"Focus on me for a moment Maria."
Reluctantly her eyes pulled away from the man escaping down the street with the purse, as the old woman having realized for herself of the theft was screeching for help from nearby passerby's.
"Just as it will drive you crazy to not do anything so will it if you try to fix all the wrongs of the world. You are only human Maria. You're not God. Pick your battles and try to do the most good that you can with the limited resources available to you."
Maria nodded shaking slightly, as she tried to ignore all the little terrible things that were happening all around us that so few in the crowd were even noticing.
A married man slipping his wedding ring off before saying hello in a charming fashion to a younger woman he was offering to share his taxi with.
A man with a clipboard, who under the guise of having a tourist look at what he was offering clipped to the clipboard in the form of a coupon of some sort, was meanwhile slitting the tourist's fanny pack with a box cutter and stealing both their identity and vacation money.
The passerby stopping to pick up the $20 bill that fell from the person ahead of him before hurriedly stuffing it into his own pocket, with a furtive glance around to see if he'd been noticed.
A tear slipped down Maria's cheek and I could sense through my shared conscious link with her that she was panicking.
"I don't like this!" Maria said her words almost sounding out as if they were one long groan of angst caused by the turmoil that she felt all around her.
"I don't like it either Maria, but……"
Maria vaulted out of her chair and shoved through the people on the packed sidewalk to dive into the street and scoop up a little boy that had wandered away from his distracted tourist parents. She dodged out of the way of a fast-moving taxi that would've ran over the little boy, even as a slower moving taxi came to a screeching halt in front of Maria.
With the taxis' horn blaring loudly Maria quickly stepped from the street and delivered the boy back to his horrified parents. Maria waived away their copious ' Thank You's ' and started backing away into the crowd that had gathered, until she pressed up against me.
I leaned forward enough to whisper into her ear, "but……… how does saving that little boy's life make you feel now? Worth risking some sanity for?"
"Yes!" She breathed out.
I took her hand then and led her out through the crowd that already begun to break up.