Closing The Divide, 20

Travel has done a lot to help narrow for me the divide that I have commonly experienced between haves and have-nots. Here's why: Poor people don't travel. All our limited income goes to housing and feeding us with very little left over for disposable income. A lot of us don't even have savings accounts for the simple reason that there is nothing left to save at the end of the month. I have somehow managed to break out of that cycle, while still living on a low income. In fact, because my spending habits and priorities have always been on the disciplined and focussed side, all it's really taken is living in subsidized housing and Bob's Yer Uncle. After six years here in my building I suddenly was able to travel to Costa Rica, the year following to Mexico City, and elsewhere, year after year. Never, whether on the plane or in the hotel or bed and breakfast, do I meet persons as poor as me. Indeed, I have had to develop and refine some rather interesting new social skills in order to reach across the divide to the many fellow travellers I have met and befriended. It hasn't always been easy, especially at first. How do you tell someone that the only reason you can live in an apartment downtown in one of the world's most expensive cities, is by benefitting from the taxpayers' largess, that you are living in a social housing building full of people with mental health issues, the working poor, poor seniors and poor immigrants who are still recovering from refugee trauma? What are they going to think of you? Well, I suppose they are going to think whatever they want of me, but that is really more their problem than mine. I have learned to only explain whatever calls for explanation at the moment and to stay quiet about everything else. This is neither lying nor dissimulation, rather it is communicating strategically and effectively, and really, one of the golden rules of breaking ice and forming new friendships is in being a good, active and interested listener, which is a skill that my career as a mental health peer support worker has done wonders to help me hone and refine. Knowing when and how to punch above my weight also helps. Even though I couldn't afford to finish my postsecondary education, I have become so well read and well informed that my breadth of knowledge and my way of carrying and expressing myself indicates t least an advanced university degree. This has nothing to do with being a pretender or parvenu and everything to do with wanting to know my world, be informed, and carry myself with dignity and grace. It was also such encounters while abroad that have permanently cured me of wealth envy, which is something I never have really suffered from that much. I don't wish to categorize all better off folk as being shallow, though I still think that a lot of them are shallow, but I have found that they are all prisoners of their station in life. They need cars, personal smart phones, and to have everything planned to fit a two week itinerary. When I was in Monteverde, Costa Rica recently, I found myself feeling quite sorry for my obviously better off fellow visitors, whose reliance on pricey convenience actually prevented them from really integrating and getting to know the place they were visiting, much less the wonderful people who live there. Still, I found a lot of them to be interesting, even lovely people, and I do hope to see some of them again. I don't expect that I will ever enjoy their kind of income or lifestyle, but I don't care. I live not only well, but I live better than most people for my lack of things. This isn't to glorify grinding poverty, which itself presents an awful lot of problems, but perhaps a life of simplicity and integrity, where we can actually do more with less, and be more with less. We still need badly to close the divide and to share the wealth that is being flushed down the gold plated toilet of the One Percent. By the same token, we also have to know when to say "Enough", and work well and elegantly with the little that we really need, and to always find extra to share with others. This is something that the better off really need to learn. Those of us who are poor? Well, we need a bit more than we have, but we also have other sources of wealth that can never be bought or sold. And it is up to us to discover these riches, both in ourselves and in one another, just as it is the purview of the wealthy to really start to accept that they really own nothing, though almost anything can, and unfortunately, does, own them.