A World Outside Mine

My world is usually composed of all things wonderful. I have been sheltered since I was a child, and twenty so years later I still am within the comfortable bounds of my parents. Some people say I have been “too sheltered”, that I don’t know what it is like in the real world, and that I’ve had it easy while others are worrying and struggling all throughout their lives.

I’ve been exposed to different environments and I have learned to deal with different kinds of people. But one doesn’t have to actually look for poverty, it’s all over. In fact majority of the population consider themselves poor. The pressing fact about me and about most of the people in our society is, we choose to look the other way.

How can I live in comfort, sometimes even grumbling about how some things are not just the way I like them, while other people do not even have a home to go to at night? How could I refuse to eat just because I don’t feel like eating while others are dying because of lack and hunger? How could I complain of going to school for another semester while millions of youth do not have the means for a college education? And how could I so easily forget how blessed I am and how I need to be a blessing? As soon as I finish writing this, pick up the PSP or a book, I’d shut myself within my world, where all things are wonderful. And just like that, people in need, poverty, and problems, all of them are kept outside. I chose to look the other way.

I’m rambling. But I just realized how I could be so indifferent to the world, to the real world. Here I am worrying about my chipped nails, about getting my hair done, about my patients in the clinics next sem, about what book to read next, while almost 50,000 people in China died because of the earthquake. I’m not saying I’d pack my bags and go to China to help. But through all these I realized how my worries are petty, it’s shameful, I know. I also realized that instead of exhausting my brain cells trying to think of a way to lose weight, maybe I need to focus on things that are of more value. People have died in China, but as I write, people are still “dying”, people are in need and they’re not in China, they are just an arms reach.

I really wish I would learn to keep my eyes and my heart open so that my compassion for people wouldn’t be a random bursts phenomenon. And I wish that my all – things – wonderful world wouldn’t keep me from reaching out and lending a hand, to anyone… to everyone.