What’s so bad about your being deprived of that?

“And what’s so bad about your being deprived of that?
All things seem unbearable to people who have become spoilt, who have become soft through a life of luxury, ailing more in the mind than they ever are in the body.”

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Have you become soft or been spoilt and thus cold to anothers plight?

I know I have. Living in a developed first world country with the luxury of clean water, a wide variety of quality food (far too much of it if I’m honest), good education, a society with systems in place to help when times are hard. These may not sound like luxuries to many of us lucky ones.

To those that know real poverty, strife and fear I suspect they sound like dreams.

I try, and often fail, to empathize, to understand and to imagine what life is like in other peoples shoes.

This is not a race to the bottom. Rather a reminder, for myself, that I am lucky. That I should cherish the opportunities I have and maybe not be as quick to grumble when my first world Eden is not quite as ‘perfect’ as I would like.

It also reminds me that I have a duty to help others in some small way. Be it a packet of biscuits left for the food bank. Making sure I tidy up and leave communal facilities fit and ready for the next person who made need them far more than I.

Or simply to check my ego, not say the unkind thing and to smile at someone who may not have received such as small gift for some time. You never know that free little smile may mean the world to another. Transforming a bad day into a good.