We live in a beautiful world

...Where we have the freedom to eat when we want, pay our own bills or default, go for midnight walks, be cared about without being stifled, where the rules of our childhood don’t apply, where we make our own rules, decide who or what it is we wish to become. The freedom to make a journey. The freedom to choose where to start that journey and who with. The freedom to feel no fear, the freedom to be insecure, the pleasure of being proven right, the privilege of being wrong. A world where ignorance can be acceptable, amusement is paramount, laughter a necessity. Where we constantly battle age, experience, cynicism, and bitterness. Where apathy is institutionalized, where we understand caring to have its constraints, where idealism isn’t spelt with a capital “i”, where we try balance our ambitions with our conscience. Where we believe everything but hold nothing sacrosanct.

We live in a beautiful world where we pet street dogs but a roadside feast for the maggots does not soil our slumber. Where a child curled up within his red and white striped T-shirt on a narrow pavement is another image to be remembered as the eyes of a young boy, straining to hold his tray while men in fine suits brush past him, his burden ignored, his eyes filled with the anguish of the lost, searching for an escape. Trapped eyes, ready to tear. We live in a beautiful world where my response is a smile and a second cup of coffee. Eyes I remember long after my conscience finds rest, my ‘goodness’ is established. My beautiful world where child labour moves me but fails to anger, where what can’t be helped is tolerated. Where no one’s heart bleeds enough or at all. Where empathy is startling, understanding heavy, anger fleeting, niceness the best response. Where looking away is a solution and escape is named self-preservation. Where these words are fragile sounds in my head whose impact is no more permanent than the position of this morning’s clouds.