Balancing

On the way back in the airplane, I sat next to a friendly young man and we had an interesting conversation. He comes from Afghanistan but left his home country to find a better life and to study abroad. It is very clear that there are many problems in his homecountry and that actually, unlike what many people think, a lot of them are against the governors in their country and consider the IS and Taliban to be extremists. They do not agree with them and definitely don’t want to live their lifes as they are told to do.

This young man understands that the people that do follow these extremist ideals, is because of ignorance and/or fear. He doesn’t want to partake in this at all but feels a responsability towards his own wellbeing and education so he won’t be an ignorant person.

During our conversation I told him about my visit and how I also see some of my friends being very materialistic and shutting themselves off from any source of information to educate themselves. I feel hurt when I’m not able to let them see the beauty of living in harmony and focus on social structures instead of being selfish and only focused on having as much materials as possible.

Then he made a great argument, to which I agree completely. It’s all about leading by example, without arrogance, to show, what life can be about. Instead of distanciating us from people that have these believes or thoughts, we should keep contact with them because we’re their bridge to information that leads to wisdom. If we’re not there, the bridge will collapse and they won’t get on the other side, which is exactly the opposite of what we want to achieve. We have to show them, through love and guidance, that life has a deeper meaning and that true happiness lies within us.

The world is completely unbalanced, we have ‘rich’ countries and ‘poor’ countries, and there is little effort to get it balanced. We believe it’s important that educated people, with the right tools, from ‘rich’ countries, should go out and help the people in ‘poor’ countries. People from ‘rich’ countries have way more opportunities than the people from ‘poor’ countries. That’s why it depends on people from ‘rich’ countries to help out the rest and it depends on people from ‘poor’ countries to receive this help so they can be open towards change and improvement. Also people from ‘rich’ countries will see with this kind of work that there is a lot more to life than just financial and materialistic wellbeing. It’s a job we have to do together and ignorance is a choice for ‘wealthy’ people, so make the right choice.

Thank you for reading this and comment if you’d like, I’m always open to other people’s insights.