The fish in the musky, damp air

I think I had one of them moments today. You know, the one's where you think... 'Shit...'. Basically, earlier today, I was a bit grumpy. I had a lot of running around to do, being a journalist on my day off. With a hangover. In half term, so surrounded by little children darting around everywhere. And as my hangover worsened and my pen ran out, I felt a little bit like the world was against me. But then, I went to a homeless shelter and this all kind of changed. It changed because after about an hour, I walked out of the shelter, went home and had a coffee, and have since carried on living my normal life. Probably what most of the people in the shelter are longing to do. It basically gave me a little perspective that I hope to keep with me for a long time. Forgive me for such a sweeping statement, but I believe that journalists probably have the most appreciation for their lives. They get to see a wider scale of people than other professions, they get to see the filthy rich  and the, well, basically, the filthy.
I've been walking around with a dark cloud over my head for the past few weeks, letting little things consume me and bring me down. Do I have any real problems? No. Not after today, I don't. I know it all sounds very cliche' and predictable, and I know I haven't exactly been to the slums in Brazil, but I'm glad it's made an impact on me. Obviously, the world would be a better place without the bad things, but they really do make us lucky ones stop sweating the small stuff.
I think that a  lot of people have the opinion of 'don't like it - do something about it' but I started to get a feel for how hard it must actually be to break the cycle of homelessness. Well, to break any cycle is hard, that's why it's called a cycle. There's some logic for you.
This year, I seem to have picked up this mentality of putting fun first. Having a good time seems paramount at the minute because I'm so aware that my younger years won't last forever. I don't mean that I'm going out every night and getting wasted, but I do seem to have some kind of quarter-life crisis emerging. Anyway, today's events kind of made me realise...what if this happened to me one day? It didn't help that my interviewee said to me 'this could happen to you one day'!
How many sad things do we need to witness before we realise that we don't need to worry about the insignificant things?
As the man showing me round the homeless shelter listed the different types of politically incorrect meat that they serve for dinner, and I felt my hangover preparing to leap out of my mouth, I realised that in the same room as me, people were probably holding much worse poison in their veins. I guess the moral of today, kids, is that we should always remember that there's someone worse off than ourselves. So don't worry, there's someone out there, somewhere, reading a worse blog post than this.