A bar in Harbin, Northern China, a frigid and stunning city.
1. Anyone who says that money isn’t everything is revealing that they have lived their life in bourgeois or “better” socioeconomic circumstances. Poverty is health-annihilating and soul-sapping. It keeps you in a constant state of flight or fight, jangled nerves wondering when the next crisis is going to wipe you out.
Poverty has a potent, negative effect on IQ. With protracted poverty, the connections between nerves wither, particularly in the cerebral cortex, causing the nervous tissue to appear like trees in winter. This isn’t a subtle phenomenon when you’re the one experiencing it: Sustained poverty is literally stupefying.
And sometimes you have to take the shittier job simply because that first paycheck arrives earlier.
2. Hunger hurts. Not hunger for a few hours, which is the only way that many in the developed Western world have ever experienced it. Longer-term hunger hollows out areas of the body that are meant to be filled with flesh and cushioned with fat. It becomes painful to sit or to rest in almost any position; you feel bone poking through where it shouldn’t be.
3. People without much to give are the most generous in the world – a cliché, I realize, but a valid one.
Steinbeck hit the nail on the head in The Grapes of Wrath: “If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.”
4. As the eighth-century theologian and writer Al’Shafi’i put it: “Health is a crown that the healthy wear on their heads, but only the sick can see it.” When you have compromised your health irreversibly, the depth of loss and regret are beyond description with mere words.
The nature of addiction means that you will seldom be able to predict or control when you cross the point of no return and inflict permanent damage on yourself. Please, from the bottom of my heart to those of you for whom it is not too late, get help and stop now. Today. This moment. I have seen people finally ready for recovery – only to discover that their lifespan has been reduced to a few years due to cirrhosis or damage to their heart from endocarditis.
5. Addicts are the lumpenproletariat. We receive disdain, disgust, and all too frequently, distilled hatred. Some of this negativity is grounded in the crime and chaos that active addicts leave in their wakes, but the judgment that we receive is beyond any sane proportion. We are the punching bags of a sick society, punished because we represent the worst fears of many people who struggle to contain their urges and vices in an age of supreme decadence – as well as those who wallow in the misery of self-deprivation instead of finding spiritually and physically healthy ways to feed their souls.
6. Moments of heroism are rare but real. Human beings are capable of the most profound, unexpected, and beautiful self-sacrifice. In addition to the upstanding individuals who you would “expect” this behavior from, I have witnessed it from some of the “lowest” members of society.
No matter how deep you have descended into addiction or depression, please find time for the pursuits that nourish your soul. Make art – even if it’s just by keeping a journal or coloring mandalas. Find a way to be of service. For me, there is something powerfully renewing and optimism-restoring about spending time with young people. If I didn’t have teaching in my life during many of the roughest points of my addiction and recovery, I doubt that I would’ve been able to reconcile my worldview with my continued existence.
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