Hardship.

I read recently – most likely somewhere in Meditations‘ thorough footnotes – that Marcus Aurelius slept on the floor.

He was Emperor of Rome, but he believed in frugality of living as a means to keep himself grounded and faithful to his post.

And just today, I was reading about the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu’s 2400 year-old Taoist text, which espoused the ‘Three Jewels’ for life (I’m simplifying to the point of misrepresenting it, but bare with me) – ‘compassion’, ‘frugality’ and ‘humility’.

I should be clear – I know absolutely nothing about the text itself, or the philosophy it’s based in/on, or anything really about Lao Tzu. I’m purely referring to these three concepts which captured my imagination today.

Compassion, frugality and humility. Compassion is an interesting one – I think it deserves an in-depth exploration of its own. I wonder how we even measure compassion, for example. I think I’m a relatively compassionate person, but relative to what I don’t know really. I feel pity for those less fortunate than I to a degree, but I don’t make a whole lot of effort to do anything about it; does this make me less compassionate than others? I feel like it’s more complicated than that, but maybe it’s just the case that some people are in a position to become more emotionally invested in other people than others.

Yeah, I’m going to leave that alone for now. I’ll leave humility alone too – not because it’s as complex as compassion, although it certainly has its complexities, but because I want to focus for now on frugality, and how it relates to hardship.

I come from a fairly well-off economic background. My parents are both health professionals, and I was lucky enough to attend a private, all-boys school in an affluent corner of an affluent nation.

In short, I have never really known hardship. And this concerns me.

It concerns me because if I achieve my goals, and play my cards right, I won’t ever have to experience hardship. Of course, if things don’t play out, this may not be the case – but even if I screw things up to an unimaginable magnitude, I will still be better off than a significant portion of the country, let alone the world.

The prospect of hardship is terrifying, as it should be to a young man who has never known it. I’ve read stories, seen pictures and heard tales from places where fear is a way of life – fear of death, of starvation, of disease, of violence, of losing your loved ones and dependants.

I’ve heard it said that poverty is the great equaliser. Part of me feels, perhaps even knows, that to die without ever having experienced poverty is to die without knowing an important part of the human condition. It’s not an unfortunate event of course, to miss this – quite the contrary. But I imagine that to emerge from the mire of poverty and break the shackles of economic and social disenfranchisement is to emerge a stronger, tougher, more capable individual.

Perhaps someone who would be better placed to understand compassion, frugality and humility.

And then again, maybe not. I simply don’t know, and most likely will never know.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell recalls an incident where he locks eyes with a woman engaged in some dirty and debilitating task and he… Wait, wait, let me find the quote, I can’t do this justice…

“[her face] wore, for the second I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen… What I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.”

Horrific images abound, and some intense accompanying emotions, especially when considering that this kind of occurrence is part of a daily existence for a great deal of the world’s population. Even before accounting for any violence and civil war.

The fact that it is so difficult for me to imagine the distress and sheer destitution that people are routinely subjected to is somewhat distressing in itself. Part of me – God only knows what part – wants desperately to know what this is like.

If I don’t, then can I be compassionate? If I don’t understand something, how can I possibly empathise with it? And If I can’t empathise, I surely can’t sympathise, and if I can’t sympathise, I can’t pity, and if I can’t pity, then surely I can’t be compassionate?

If this is the case, then what does it mean for charities that are not born out of redemption from hardship? What does it mean for policymakers who claim to represent the interests of those suffering hardship?

Can I ever claim to know anything about the human condition when such a large piece is entirely missing?

I’m making enormous assumptions, and honestly I don’t think I’ve ever written such a meandering blog post. But this is something that’s been on my mind for a while. Maybe I’ll make more sense of it in future. Or not – who can say?