Those humble beings who are filled
with keen understanding and meditative contemplation,
even though they intermingle with others,
they remain distinct.
—Siri Guru Granth - Ang 23
I’ll spare you the details of how this situation arose, but a friend of mine found himself in the middle of nowhere North Carolina, drinking a room-temperature Budweiser in a dingy, cat-piss apartment with no cat. Across from him on the couch was what he described as a lonely, angry white guy in his mid-twenties. The context of this meeting (that eerily resembles a scene from the Jeffrey Dahmer docuseries I watched recently) is irrelevant to what I plan to focus on here: his backstory.
The guy was born in Russia, where his biological parents gave him up to an orphanage. He was then adopted by an American couple who brought him over to the States. His adoptive father cheated on his adoptive mother and then got into a car accident that killed his mistress, so he killed himself. This inspired his wife to spiral down a rabbit hole of crack and eventually overdose. Oh, and somewhere in the midst of all this happening, this fella was molested by his adoptive sister.
Isn’t that just a happy little way to start off life, where now you’re left to work a minimum wage job with no friends and hate everything?
No one wants to hear a no-happy-ending, dead-end story, but they sure do put most of ours into perspective, don’t they? That’s the sole reason I share this with you: if you’re feeling even the slightest bit of “woe is me” before reading this, like I was, watch it evaporate into thin air.
Remember to be filled with keen understanding and meditative contemplation and remain distinctly humble as you intermingle with others. And do yourself a favor: put your Budweiser on ice.