SOCIETY AND BELONGING
Kindness of the Stranger, Beauty of the Unknown
The reason why your job is never done here on earth. Even as you vanish, you will always be wandering.
When I feel down, there is one thought that always lifts me back up. It is not a motto for success or perseverance.
This thought makes me immeadiately recapture the reality I have been missing. Because I have been too busy sulking about little worries and mistaking them for the reality, when really they were just peripheral within the big picture.
It’s the simple idea that:
the world is big.
It’s so big that it’s not possible to describe its magnitude with kilometres and nautical miles.
Its bigness lies not in the amount of countries you can visit or the number of people who live in each of them.
It’s so much bigger than that.
The world is a host to endless amount of human and non-human personalities and so much that we don’t know.
When this thought appears in my mind, I am refilled with joy all of a sudden; thinking of all the possibilities, every personality I am yet to encounter, every adventure I am yet to embark upon, every little bits of knowledge I am yet to gain, as well as everything that I will never know and everyone that I will never encounter. In that sense, I will never be complete. None of us ever will be.
So, no.
You didn’t just figure out the strange phenomenon called life.
You don’t know every single person’s intrinsic motivation because humans are always the same, vassals to their ego.
The curious smile of a grandma in northern Portugal who reaches you oranges from a tree in her garden as you are on your way to Santiago de Compostela is enough to remind you of this very phenomenon.
One little girl in Cambodia, whose genuine smile reminds you so much of the child within you.
A Syrian man who buys you a fancy friendship bracelet on your flight to India because he is thankful for your home country’s hosting of his people, even when you had nothing to do with this.
The idea that here is so much kindness to give and to receive. It’s so much that you can not even possibly witness it all.
Call me naive. Because I am. And I own it.
It’s one quality I most wholeheartedly inherited from my parents. And it has opened so much doors for me in life. Maybe not in the opportunistic, business context this phrase is often used in, but for introducing me to people, emotions and concepts beyond my imagination.
There is still so much beauty in the world to discover, uncover and sometimes be reminded of — because life makes you forget even those you have already encountered before.
In that sense, this thought is very powerful for me.
To be reminded of my very tiny existence. To think that I am nothing but a little particle in this giant planet. You don’t even have to go as far as the Mars or the Moon to feel excited about the magnitude of this universe.
The planet we are on is enormous enough to give you tingles when you think how you will possibly never understand it all.
And by you, I mean everyone.
Even when you are the president of one of the world’s most powerful countries, you will not. Because you will be too buried in your calculations of maintaining the maximum national interest of a nation that is imagined in the first place. You will be too busy to lift your head up and see that you might have more in common with a wanderer in Sahara who is humbled by her existence than your advisors in your residence.
Even if you are the inventor of the best technology since sliced bread and think you are on your way to colonise the universe, you are probably still missing so much because you have never taken the time to sit and watch the intricate beauty of the succulents on your window.
We are all some tiny beings in this beautiful planet.
And all the endless possibilities, the ones that might very well realise as well as the ones that never will excite me so much that I am lifted back up higher than I have fallen.
