According to an old fable, attributed to Aesop, “A dog was carrying a bone as he crossed a bridge. He looked into the water and saw his own reflection. He took this to be another dog and another bone. He desperately wanted the other bone so he dropped the one he had to scare the ‘other dog.’ Of course there was no other bone and he lost the one he had into the water.”

In the effort to get what we want, we progressively lose what we have. What we lose is not necessarily limited to our material belongings. That would not be a catastrophe, really. What we lose are our values, our unique human facet that makes us a different species from animals; from Aesop’s dog.

Is this what our society desires? I do not believe so. What I am most concerned with, however, is that the deceit which is borne out of our craving for voraciousness is, alas, a contagion. Reflections, to us humans, should give us insight into ourselves and we should correct our ways so that we would get inspired to use our warm heart, our compassion and our honesty, not so much our brains. Our brains are there to be a medium which our soul employs to love and care, and not vice-versa. If we let our brain dominate our attitude, our soul would be lost in our avidity, greed and infatuation for all things earthly. It is, put simpler, just like the robot that flips out of control while its creator gently weeps, regretting the moment he invented it!

The easy way and the right way are the bad way and the good way, respectively. Is it not easier, but offensive, to fetch favours to gain more material things? But that road leads us to more wishes for achievements of the materialistic kind – power, wealth, status, class resentment, hamallagni pulita, and so on. Would we have time to see, let alone help the Christ in others? How can we, if all we do when we are awake is dig deeper in our own little world of selfishness? Our material ways become our idols. And when we try to sleep at night we are haunted by thoughts of the easy, but burdening schemes; of our inquietude; of our own self-created uncanny wonderland which we shortsightedly establish as our “happiness” – a never-quenching thirst for more wealth, power and vanity, after all. It is a life squandered in working hard, day and night, to amass. Sleepless nights follow and our social behaviour turns to a mundane cheap talk of our latest acquisition and the castle to build thereon.

Even our holidays develop into our portable offices. We then have to pay (or accept) sleazy money and we lose our freedom forever or until we repent. We dig deeper in squalidness to hide the past. We get absorbed in a snowball effect that can only be stopped either by being caught or by an unrelated mishap or tragedy.

There is nothing better than the truth and there is only one truth, no matter how much we try to spin it, even if we fool ourselves. We go down the easy way and we would have taken the hellish path, unknowingly or knowingly – depending at which level of hard-headedness we have stooped to – making all our immediate circle of friends, family and acquaintances live the same fate. The loved ones sense us and they pity us, in secret. And if any of our peers tries to be truthful with us, we start doubting in that person. Why? Because the truth hurts. We block our receptive senses. We even find the need to marginalise that person. He or she becomes our enemy, if needs be. We become the gossip subjects, or shall I say objects – it depends on which side of the truth we are. The powerful, the materially wealthy are exalted, and they worship their vain images on the media displaying their latest obsession. I am most definitely not referring to the honest businessman, entrepreneur, professional and general worker who, after all, are shining examples of the genuine, unassuming and admired attitude – them, I laud as I believe they are essential for a healthy economy. The humble and indisputably happy become, sometimes unknowingly as if by culture default, our outcasts. Ours become the sick minds of the hell-on-earth mindset.

Little do we know how much honest and humble persons strive to find a way to help us come out of our crooked fantasy. Theirs is an outreach which we instinctively eschew because we can never accept to even reconsider our weird ways, even though we are living hell. Our pain should not be the result of our easy cause. Our ache should be the desire to help others find the way of the good, the truth and the right way; to assist and support the poor, the deprived, the underprivileged and the desolate. We have to be receptive to them so that they can find love in us. That is why I assert that one can only give of what one has. If we do not love ourselves, how can we love others?

I believe that only in this way can we find genuine happiness. Let us endeavour to live it, for the good of ourselves, our children and society at large.

Let us look around us, not to grab and seize, but to give and receive, especially true happiness and indescribable satisfaction and fulfilment. For where our treasure is, there our heart will be, also.

Jo Said

Selmun