A coldhearted species of intillect

Today I finally felt the thoughtless rush of emotion that just carries you away with it, not caring where you'll end up, as long as you ride the emotion. I'd been reading the Anne Rice vampire series, and on every page, she describes life like I want to experience it; with every paragraph, there's a strong emotion, a thoughtless current of just feeling, a wave of experience so pure that the mind does not interfere. I yearned for it with every cell in my body while I read, but whenever I stepped into the real world, I fell back into the normal and dull pattern of thinking, dissecting every little movement, feeling, spoken or even unspoken word. Making everything into logic. That's what we all do, isn't it? Make sense out of everything, categorize every experience, make our personalities out of our classified happenings.

But I finally broke free of that and saw the world for what it really was. We are cruel people, truly. We are all selfish, egotistical, prideful and insecure, no matter how 'good' you think you are. We hear about people dying from AIDS in Africa, beggars starving in the streets of India, homeless people that have no mercy from nature or even their fellow human beings, but yet we do nothing about it. We think, 'I wish I could help them', and then go about doing our business again. Never once have we really stopped to think what it feels like to be in their shoes, in their bodies!

If you were them, you'd be embarrassed, so humiliated to feel so dirty, to feel that nobody wants to touch you because you carry the source of death. Embarrassed to be seen so starved and dirty, begging for money just to survive the wrath of your keeper, the one who gives a roof over your head, the only one who would take and care of you, only because his compassion comes out of greed. Embarrassed to not have a roof over your head, not being able to sustain yourself and your family because no one want to hire a hobo.

Have you really felt that embarrassment? Have you really felt that dirtiness in you that no one wants to touch you or even look at you? That you're so dirty that you don't want anyone to look at you? Have you, truly, felt that embarrassed, even for a split second?

If you have, it changes your entire way of thinking. Today, I had been rearranging my room and cleaning every single corner of it until it was sparkly. We had formation a few hours after we started, and by that time, my roommate had finished cleaning her things and taken a nice shower and eaten. I on the other hand was still cleaning. And it was time for formation, something I couldn't miss unless I was accounted for.

But it was something I desperately wanted to miss in my state of being. Standing in front of 100 people inside a Gudwara, a sacred place, and covered in filth and hungered to the point where you could hear my stomach growl was not exactly the nicest situation. As I tried getting excused, something happened in me. I felt embarrassed. It wasn't that I was embarrassed of how I look, I could care less how I looked. But I felt so dirty that being in such a spiritual place so filthy was embarrassing. I felt like dust was swirling behind me with every step I took, that I reeked with the stench of sweat and old dust that had been collecting in corners. And my hunger was unbearable.

I finally was allowed to go to my room and on the way, tears started flowing. I couldn't stop them, it was just a rush of emotion. I truly felt embarrassed. If I'd have tried making logic out of the situation, I'd have thought it was stupid to feel this way. But as I didn't, I let the emotion take me to wherever it had in store for me. While I was taking a shower, still crying uncontrollably, it came to me that I had just felt a fraction of what the child beggars on the streets of India felt. And this realization just make me shed tears faster.

If this is how much I was affected by a little dust, I couldn't even imagine how the people who live in this filth everyday feel like, people that don't have the money or resources to bathe, to have a clean and healthy body. They have to live every day having to beg for food or money just to get by, and with that comes an immense embarrassment. To have to stoop so low as to beg, that is unbearable for a human with dignity, which any person should have. To beg mean to show that you cannot sustain your family, that you are either lazy or crippled to work. And that must be incredibly embarrassing.

With this rush of feeling came the realization that people who live so richly as to afford a fancy house and car and expensive food and clothes have no mind to share with the homeless. And this is only because they fear to part with their money, they fear to help someone so dirty and filthy who seems to have no dignity that they haven't found a job. Yes, we humans are a cruel race. To help a stranger takes so much effort. We cannot find the space in our hearts to give food, shelter, a bath, and medicine to those who truely need it. It takes so much effort, it seems, to travel to India, or Africa, and just choose one poor child out of the hundreds or dirty faces and give them a bath and clean clothes. To adopt them, take them into your home, feed them and give them shelter until they can legitimatly work. As for education, there's this thing called a public school system.

But no, we humans do not have any space in our hearts for any of our species unless they are blood related, and even then there are many scandals within families. So sad, don't you think?

Yes, a truly heartless species we are.