The desire to live
I was at the robots this morning, a few cars back listening to St Germain so loudly my windows were vibrating and feeling on top of the world. I had just finished a meeting with a truly inspiring woman where we discussed solutions for parenting programs. I looked up and saw a beggar in front of a car on both knees.
What kind of atrocities and depravity and total submission of self must a person go through to kneel on hard tar, literally begging for any kind of support, money, food… hope. As he knelt there, holding up his cardboard plea I was filled with such a sense of… actually I can’t describe the feeling. It was not sadness, it was not pity, it was closer to peace.
In a strange way by witnessing this scene it stripped away from me the layers of my life and of my self that mean nothing but that I give so much attention to. Needless purchases, pointless arguments, worries so out of sync with reality they should be farcical. All these components of modern society that we cloak ourselves in, that work towards keeping us separated from the suffering of our fellow humans and the suffering of our planet.
I admit it is a constant subject of debate within me. Individual survival versus collective survival. My reality so far removed from that of the beggar. Realistically speaking the world must carry on, people must continue to strive, humanity must continue to develop technology and explore and live.
There are groups who advocate the total collapse of life as we know it; oil production, natural resource consumption, monopolies, corporate empires… this of course is ridiculous as the ensuing chaos would create the kind of devastation we only envisage in our worst nightmares.
But at the same time, the modern world is out of touch with purity. Love, respect and compassion for your fellow human beings and animals as well as the planet itself. I do not have to give up my ambition, my love of good food or thrilling adventures or pursuits that the modern world provides so that others may prosper. But if we could close the gap between basic survival and wanton unconsciousness I do believe our world would be vastly improved.
“Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight” this quote sums it up perfectly. Do people focus on fashion and power and prestige and drinking and all the other total useless pursuits so that they may not have to witness the layer of suffering living just a fraction away from them?
Or are people genuinely not equipped to identify with this aspect of human life, perhaps due to their inability to have compassion for that which they themselves have not experienced?
I don’t know. I do know that I am grateful for these experiences, it keeps my soul alive, it removes the stress of striving for something that is worthless and the joy I feel when I am privelaged to share in anothers pure joy because I opened my handbag and gave a piece of paper that enables that one person to eat a meal and to have hope.
