"Hey, a blessing gone is not a blessing lost, but a blessing flowed"

I don't like waiting, patience is not one of my best virtues yet. Which explains why I tend to get impatient queuing up (had a dream last night and a couple of people jumped my queue, boy did I go raging mad, haha), or when it comes to things like waiting for trains. Especially when trains get delayed. And I can tell you that that is pretty common in the UK. Haha.

But there's this one time, when I was heading for Guildford, and I spontaneously decided to go on the train earlier than plan. I literally had 2 minutes from the turnstiles down to the station. And I got on the train just in time - because it was delayed for 2 minutes. Felt totally blessed. Then I thought about it. My 2-minutes-of-blessing may have costed someone at the stations before to be late for their appointment, or for someone at stations further down the line to miss another connecting train. While today is my lucky day, for someone else, it might not be the case. This humbly reminded me of the interconnectedness between humans, we are all but one dot in a large, large, large universe.

You know how we are always thought since young by parents about African children who are dying of starvation, to encourage us to not waste our food and finish our bowl of rice? While I think this downward comparison is one form of encouragement, I also think that it's not necessary the best way to frame it. There's the notion of superiority which I feel uncomfortable with. Plus, it generates guilt unnecessarily where people feel uncomfortable having rice to eat because why do they deserve to eat when someone else is starving? In general, I don't think comparison is a good way to get people to appreciate what they have. My mum always say "比上不足，比下有余" (bi shang bu zu, bi xia you yu) which is a Chinese idiom that means there's always someone better, and there's always someone worse than you; in the end, why compare? In the end, we are always better than someone in one facet, someone is better than us in one facet and another person is better than us in another facet; but all these differences make us essentially the same. Which is why in psychological experiments we seek heterogeneity (variety) because when you have so much differences, everyone is the same difference. Everyone is interconnected.

So while we don't necessary compare, it helps to think of ourselves within the context of a bigger world, that an action we do, or a blessing given upon us could affect someone something somewhere else. While we don't have to think of ourselves better than another person in order to appreciate what we have, we can acknowledge that we are given different blessings and by valuing that, you honour what others lose. And with the given blessings, do what we can to make a change and help others. Just cause you are better off financially than another person, does not require you to live like a pauper but it does advocate living by your means and to use the financial blessings to help others in ways that benefit them (not throwing money at people to shut them up thank you). We all make do with what we have to help another person, because interconnectedness means that this kindness has a ripple effect.

Personally, remembering the interconnectedness gives me peace at heart, and makes me feel human. It does not mean that I am not sad when I don't get something or lose something. But knowing that this loss/not-getting could be influencing someone else's life somewhere makes me feel like "Hey, a blessing gone is not a blessing lost, but a blessing flowed"

P.S.: This post was inspired by a conversation with my brother who visited the leprosarium and his story about how those living there had a quiet sense of acceptance. And that his visit did not make him feel better or worse, but it did humble him thinking about the different lives humans live.

P.P.S: I found a video by a friend who recorded the life at the leprosarium when he was visiting (yeap, same visit as my brother), haha.