One is used to be scared of the word ‘poverty’ and all its derivatives,
As soon as it is uttered, we think of sad faces, thin bodies, rags for clothes, and parched earth…
If one is lucky, such austere form of poverty is far from sight,
perhaps on the other side of the world,
only to be encountered through a news piece or a social media photo, both to be scrolled away as fast as possible.
But poverty is closer than one thinks,
not just hiding in cities that have mastered the art of hiding it,
but in our souls that have managed to confine it to the dark corners of our existence,
far from our sight,
but that changes nothing,
for one’s poverty is there, even if one is not aware of it.
There is a lot of reasons why we do so,
and our poverty isn’t the only reality of ours that our lack-of-awareness tries to hide away,
but there’s such a sense of liberty in knowing that deep down,
we are poor,
we are needy,
we know nothing,
we own nothing,
and we are dependent,
far more dependent than we think we are,
dependent on some unknown force that gets by different names – depending on which part of the world you come from or which philosophy you subscribe to -,
dependent on others around us even if we kid ourselves otherwise…
We control nothing,
and we owe everything that we own to outside forces.
Without knowledge of one’s poverty,
one can never be aware of such a gift of life.