Have we lost our human touch?. After meeting up with a friend for…
Tags: Helping Others, Relationships, Self Love, Inspiration, Friendship

Photo by Larm Rmah

After meeting up with a friend for dinner on a chilly Friday night, we were approached by a young coloured woman as we were making our way to the car. She looked cold and petrified as she raised her hands to her shoulders and said, “I’m not a beggar”. As a South African, such a phrase usually causes an automatic shut down response. She went on to explain how she had a two year-old son that she couldn’t afford to feed, and how she couldn’t believe she was resorting to begging. She asked if we could help with purchasing any baby food for her from the convenience store up the road. My friend and I looked at each other, unsure of what to think and what to do. He gave me a slight head nod and asked if I’d bring my car around to meet them at the store. Upon arriving in my car, I saw her hugging my friend with her groceries in hand as she proceeded to sob excessively.

The long drive home was accompanied by thoughts on top of thoughts. As humans, we’re hardwired to put ourselves ahead of others — it’s a natural, primordial instinct. Why, then, do we get such a kick out of helping other people? Most major religions have highlighted this idea, from Christianity, “And do not forget to do good and to share with others, for with such sacrifices God is pleased” to Buddhism, “If you light a lantern for another, it will also brighten your own way”. This, then, is less of an instinct and more of a Divine Law that has been integrated into each and every one of us. I’ve felt through firsthand experience those tingles of euphoria that come with helping others, therefore my biggest question that night was why I acted out in sheer hesitation when I had the opportunity and the money to help another suffering human-being.

Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael is a book about a man who begins working with a gorilla and they find that over time they’re able to communicate with each other telepathically. They start asking each other questions about their own species and their views on the world, and the readers begin to understand how horrendously out of place the human race is acting, both to each other and to the planet. Ishmael explained how when a lion kills a buffalo, when it has finished eating it doesn’t mind who eats the rest. Human-beings, on the other hand, continue to eat when they are full. They’re scared to share with others, no matter how full their pockets are, because they live in a headspace of perpetual scarcity. Money is not the root of all evil. Money can build nations, change lives, end poverty and bring peace into the world. It’s the love of money that is the root of all evil. When we place money on a pedestal, greed is birthed and it can make us act out irrationally. I have found that many wealthy people place their identity in the money that they hold, making it that much harder to give it away — be it two rand or two million rand. Many poor people, on the contrary, aren’t given the opportunity to place their identity or security in paper notes — making it that much easier for them to perceive money as an opportunity to help add value to those around them.

Warren Buffet, self-made billionaire and arguably the world’s greatest philanthropist, has pledged to donate 99% of his wealth to charities, however he explained that the one thing he hasn’t given enough of is his time. What I’ve come to realise is that the only thing more valuable than the money you can bestow on someone is the time we can dedicate to them. I realise now that the reason that I shut down when that woman warned me that she wasn’t a beggar was because I was preparing for another creative story line. It takes a great amount of humility to stop what you’re doing and give such beggars your undivided attention, despite knowing that they may or may not be stretching the truth. It can be as subtle as rolling down your window to ask a beggar how he’s doing, to taking him out for a meal. We all crave to know we exist in this world. This shield of numbness that we often bring up around the less fortunate can cause us to lose the very essence of what it means to be human. The human race survived because we were able to protect each other — we empathised with each other. Our hunger feels like their hunger. Our pain feels like their pain. Somewhere down the line we were able to forget that. The only way I see us being able to shatter this glass wall that separates us and get back to this precedented level of connection is going to be through this conscious effort to acknowledge the very existence and intricacies of every person that we find ourselves crossing paths with.

Charles Bukowski once said, “You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics”. It reminds me of that story of those thousands of starfish that were washed ashore, when a man walking the shoreline noticed a little boy in the distance picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the sea. Upon meeting the boy, the old man asked him how he was planning to make a difference as it was impossible to save every starfish on the beach. The boy thought about it, picked up another starfish and threw it back in the ocean and replied, “I made a difference for that one”. We can’t save everyone. We can’t give every beggar money. We can’t give every person our time of day. When we do, however, have the time and the resources to make a small difference in one person’s life, we open ourselves up to the opportunity to be the hero of someone else’s day. This is what it means to be human.