Or the lack thereof.
And you could equate rich / poor with living / existing.
I had an experience recently that I will never forget. Let me preface things by saying I have been in some terribly impoverished places in the world, truly 3rd world hovels in Africa and Asia, and even Central America.
Yet this didn’t take place in a 3rd world country – which is what made it all the more eye-opening for me.
I’ve thought I had a pretty good idea of the world, given my past. I spent the first few years of my life without running water or electricy in the boondocks of upper British Columbia, I’ve been homeless, and I’ve experienced upper class living.
And I travel a lot, so I have friends and acquaintances all over from all walks of life, people who are millionaires and people who don’t care about money – or at least don’t seem to, because they are happy without it – and live day-to-day.
But in my admittedly capitalistic mindset, I have always equated the caste system (which exists in all cultures to some degree) with an individual’s choice. For every Horatio Alger who chooses to rise from poverty to riches, there are those rich kids who squander the gold their fathers earned and give meaning to the phrase “sandals to sandals in 3 generations”.
For whatever reason, it never crossed my mind that maybe there was more at play than a simple choice, to be or not to be.
I’ve been talking to people about their dreams – I love to do that – about what they want to be and do and have in their lives. It was that conversation which led me to this revelation.
Everyone has dreams. Not everyone has hope.
That, for me, is like a knife to the soul. I’m not sure why I never really realized it before.
In traveling, it has been my experience that the majority of the time it is the people who have nothing who are the most generous.
Families who can barely scrape together food for the daily meal, somehow manage to kill the fatted calf (sometimes literally) for foreign guests. It has always been difficult for me to accept, but to not accept it would be far worse than simply giving true gratitude.
Those people tend to radiate with joy, especially at the act of giving. Children of poverty might know they are poor, but they know how to smile. They know how to enjoy what little they have. They are not at all like the spoiled, obnoxious, great-reminder-to-use-birth-control kids you see in the aisles of every Walmart.
And yet…somehow I have missed the fact that behind the smiles, behind the curious eyes so full of energy, there is hopelessness.
I’ve heard and read the stories. I think all Americans do, as we grow up, the stories of trials and tribulation and perseverance. The stories of the child of poverty and their determination to make it in the world.
I think hearing those stories inoculates us to the reality.
I’m not talking about children in India who dig through garbage heaps for scraps of food, or Aborigines who live in the dirt – that is a totally different level of survival that I’m not even going to attempt to hypothesize on, because it would be disrespect to the millions of people who, I don’t want to use the word “live”, but they exist in those conditions. Or maybe they live as fully as anyone else. I don’t have the answer. Perhaps I should spend a year in Papua New Guinea or India to find it.
I’m just talking about the kind of generational, cultural poverty where people have nothing and know that they will likely have nothing their whole lives. Yet they have enough, or they are in close enough proximity to wealth – be it comparative wealth or true luxury – to understand that yes, they are in a very low caste.
That’s the kind of person I found myself in discussion with recently. A girl with squelched dreams and no hope, just a kind of sad resignation. A girl for whom the possibility of the life she can imagine is never brought into play, because…it’s not a possibility. She is not unhappy, she smiles, she goes about her life. But hope is a mysterious stranger.
I told a good friend the story, and it doesn’t bear repeating here because it is personal. But something he said is worth repeating, and I paraphrase, but it was something to the effect of “you could take pretty much any kid, from anywhere in the world, and stick them in a good family someplace civilized, and give them love and food and an education, and they would develop ideas, and ambition, and a philosophy about life…”
The point was that, fate plays a role in where each person is born, and that role factors in to the overall system of planet earth. Isn’t that an interesting thought? That rich and poor and in-between, everybody is necessary for the wheels of the planet to turn as we know them.
There is no utopic location where everyone is equal. Because, if you think about it, if everyone were equal what would the people who live to protect the ‘rights’ of the downtrodden do with themselves? That utopia wouldn’t be a happy place for them, they’d have no purpose for being!
Forgive my cynical humor, but truthfully, the world is as it is. Each of us is born where our Creator planned for us to be born. We’re endowed with certain rights, which the creators of America deemed as the right to live, the right to be free, and the right to PURSUE happiness.
And we’re free to choose the occupation or vocation or calling which does make us happy. For some, that is the accumulation of wealth. For others, the accumulation of friends. And for still others, the accumulation of smiles on the faces of those who have nothing, when given something.
I grew up with parents who were missionaries. I still have a soft spot for the needy. Despite the fact that I’m an arrogant, selfish, capitalist a-hole (so think some), it’s simply a paradox, not a contradiction. I believe in individualism, and in making the most of one’s self.
But I also empathize with those who are hurting, broken, and in need – even if that need is nothing more than a hug.
Stepping away from the facade of “Ice” and all that has gone along with the past few years of my life – in most facets – has been good for me. If for nothing more than to break the chains that kept me from allowing myself to show all sides, emotion included.
I feel things, deeply. And that is human. All the better because I can logically step back and analyze those feelings, determine their motives, and then choose to accept them or correct them.
I wasn’t really ready for the feeling that hit me though when I looked into those melancholy eyes welling up with tears as I gave words to my realization of her situation. Life, for some, isn’t just hard – it is hopeless.
I remember hearing a preacher one time say “a man can live for 40 days without food, 3 days without water, but not one minute without hope.” I’ve thought about that statement many times in my life. Many times when the only thing giving me hope was my stubbornness and refusal to quit.
I think, now in this moment, that statement needs to be clarified. It is philosophically correct but technically incorrect.
Not everyone who is hopeless commits suicide. That – at least in my young western mind – is what I equated the moral of the story to be. And I’ve never bothered to question my belief in its validity.
But the truth is this: there is a difference between living and existing.
When a person loses hope, they might not die physically – but there is a subtle yet definite shift from living, and the hope of life, to existing, and the search for an escape from life.
I think we are all capable of shifting back and forth from one to the other as we move through time. We all have phases, seasons…where we fall into existing, longing for escape.
Sometimes that can lead to bad places – drugs or addictions to numb the pain that grows increasingly stronger.
But sometimes that escape can work to draw us back up out of the mire, a movie or a song or words from a friend to re-instill a touch of hope, a dash of desire, a little bit of joy that serves as enough to open the doors back up to love.
Is love the answer?
Yeah, I think so. If “God is Love”, then…
And it makes sense – love yourself, love your Creator for making you and the glorious world around you, love the people you come in contact with if that only means to draw out more goodness from them.
I understand more and more why Nathaniel Branden split ways with Ayn Rand – she was a brilliant mind and I love her work, but she missed the boat with regard to some of the more simple facets of humanity.
It is not a contradiction for me to find the goodness in people and love them for that. True, some people don’t display an ounce of goodness. Those people are beyond my strength to reach, and I avoid them.
But we all have flaws. Nobody is John Galt, nobody is Jesus Christ, nobody walks the earth as the enlightened perfect one.
I believe 100% in my statement: “strengthen your weaknesses, maximize your strengths”. To love someone doesn’t mean you accept their faults and then overlook them. It means you love the positive traits, and you address the negative ones – logically and with love. But it is up to each one of us to make the changes we need to make in ourselves.
Look, I’ll be the first one to say “if you are not constantly on the path of self-evolution, working to improve yourself, we are not going to be friends.” That doesn’t mean I won’t treat you with kindness or human dignity – but it means I am not going to go out of my way to fill my life and time with your presence, for damn sure.
I want to be around people who know themselves. Who believe in themselves enough, and love themselves enough, that they want to learn and grow and evolve.
But that comes from having instilled in one’s self a sense of hope that evolution, growth, and learning are possible. That the journey is not horizontal, but vertical, skyward and beyond.
I realize now that not everyone has been instilled with that hope. There are people for whom the shift between living and existing is not conscious, is not even distinguishable, because from conception to death they simply know a hopeless existence.
Their answer to the question “if you could be any animal, what would it be” is almost always “a bird”. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just the underlying theme: to fly as far away from here as possible.
To us “educated” westerners, we think of a hopeless existence as misery, in all facets. Yet the reality is that, just like miserable westerners might smile and laugh when they have sufficiently soused themselves, there are people around the world who still smile, and laugh, and outwardly appear happy – yet they have no hope.
Consider a child in a third-world village, playing soccer with his brothers and sisters and cousins and friends. There is laughter, there is joy, there is only that happy moment.
Don’t equate that to hope.
See, that’s the mistake I have made all my life. I equated those smiles and squeals of delight with “oh, everything is ok, they don’t know any better so yeah, whatever. They’re happy and it’s what they know, so gee, actually we should learn to be more like them, because at least they are happy.”
Wrong.
They’re living in the moment – which, when there are moments to be enjoyed, is good.
But how naive I have been to equate the smiles of a child in a simple, beautiful moment, with the feelings of a society, their culture at large.
There’s no place on earth where people are children forever. Every society has a “coming of age”, a time when, BOOM! you are no longer free to move about the cabin – the fun is over people, get in your seat and buckle up, and do as the captain tells you.
It’s not wrong – it just is.
And yet, it is in that moment when I think the lights go out for many people in the soul’s room of hope. That is wrong.
La vida is no longer carefree. There are responsibilities – and in most cultures of poverty, those responsibilities include far more than just taking care of one’s self.
There are the children, younger now, that must be clothed and fed. There are the elderly, who must be assisted and fed. There are the mooching, good-for-nothing cousins, whose demands are the only thing they are willing to snap out of their laziness to pursue – they must be satiated.
Because of those new responsibilities, and many more, hope disappears (if it was ever there to begin with). Because the cycle is un-ending. It never breaks. And in some coming of age moment there arrives the realization of such an existence.
Living stops. Existing begins. And it never ends.
That, for me, is heartbreaking.
It’s not about physical poverty – our bodies and minds are strong, they can fight through it. In that way, we are definitely members of the animal kingdom.
But the impoverished soul…the crushing blow of a dream that falsely convinces you it will never be realized, then spits in your face during so many moments of your unhappy existence.
There is no “could have been” or “should have been”. There is only “can’t”, and “won’t”.
Because nobody told them that impossible is nothing, that all things are possible, that one must only choose to keep the light on in the room of hope and seek the answers, and they will come.
Nobody told them because in such cultures, the hopelessness is self-propagating. It just grows and crescendos and is an unending flood of silent, solitary despair.
I tell them. I give encouragement, I share the love. I want people to succeed, cultural mores be damned. I want people to learn, grow, evolve. It makes me happy to help others – but I am only able to as I continue to learn, grow, and evolve myself.
This time though the reaction was unexpected. I’ve encountered many people who were caught in the cycle, who were in that rock-and-a-hard-place type of situation. I’ve offered advice, I’ve tangibly helped, and I’ve given all the encouragement I could. The more progress, the more conversation, the more they were thirsty to receive, the more I could possibly give.
But until now, I had never encountered eyes that reflected such life, and yet revealed such a void of inner hope.
“YOU CAN”. Perhaps I am more affected than she. Maybe I understand more, maybe it metaphorically spoke to me more, or maybe I simply read something more than was written.
When the light of hope shines in that darkened room – the room that, once upon a time in childhood, was filled with fanciful dreams whose colors have long since faded – the brilliance is momentarily blinding, painful.
Then comes the choice. Embrace the momentary pain of revelation and drink in the rays of potential, or turn away, cover your face, block the light…the light of love. Hope.
Gawd, I hope this isn’t the biggest downer I’ve ever written. haha. It’s kind of like most songs I write – way too much thought, way too depressing…but always ending with hope. Gee, aren’t you looking forward to me putting out an album now?
I am.
Because the only thing that has carried me through life is a freaking refusa
l to give up hope. I’ve walked in many sets of shoes. The only thing that keeps the soles intact is hope. From whatever source.
The belief that those dreams are ok to have. More, that those dreams can come true. Not from Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or by blowing people up to gain your 70 virgins.
By taking one step at a time. By asking questions. By seeking Truth. By looking in the mirror and answering questions about who you are and why you are here and deciding what you will do with those answers.
By embracing your potential. By embracing your dreams. By acting on them with love.
It’s so easy for me to say. Harder to do, yet – doable.
What has moved me to write 2,949 words about it – and more in an email to a friend – is that I do not have the answer for how to imbue hope to those for whom hope is simply, sadly, frighteningly…not an option.
I just had to get it off my chest, work through it, maybe find the answer…
If you actually read this whole thing, please – go, show somebody love. Give somebody hope. Look in the mirror, look in your own eyes, and believe – you have a purpose, your dreams are not an accident, not an illusion, they are possible.
Give yourself hope. Then share it.