I was reading a book, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about a group of WWII POWs who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced to work hard labor in the jungle. They were tortured, beaten, starved — the details of their treatment were shocking to me; the fact that humans endure such horrors and that other humans inflict them…

Anyway, it was one of those books that really made my heart raw. I was reading it in the mall food court when I saw someone throw away half their order of fries. In the book, the characters are so hungry they eat anything: Twigs, leaves, egg shells, their own refuse — because of their condition they don’t waste anything. The guy in the food court though, he has enough, he is full, so he can easily waste. The contrast really hit me; I am used to living in a world where food can be tossed, where resources are abundant, where I have more than what I need. But there is also a world of starvation, a world where there is not enough, where people scrape to get by and many don’t survive. Actually, abundance and scarcity, over-fullness and starvation, they exist in the same world, affecting different people at different moments in time.  

My own life was at a period of relative scarcity. My husband was uncertain about his company’s future and his other job prospects so we were ‘livin lean.’ Before, when things had felt more secure, we didn’t really budget, we bought what we wanted, we didn’t worry about saving a lot. But in a the face of job uncertainty, we were being more careful, we weren’t being so wasteful. In just 1 year, my life had gone through a swing from flush to lean.

So why is it so hard for me to understand that the same mechanism that took me from ‘livin large’ to ‘livin lean’ is at work in the contrast between someone throwing away fries and someone starving — things change, circumstances change. The soldiers who became POWs in the book had a life beforehand, a life where they had enough food. But then, circumstances changed and they starved. To close my eyes, to refuse to look at the ‘downer’ side of the 8 worldly conditions, means I miss 50% of the world. It means I am going to be shocked and confused when my own downer times come. And nothing in this world causes greater suffering than ignorance –then shock and confusion at how things in this world, in my life, actually are and work.