Our understanding of reality is limited by how much we know. And how much we know is limited by the tiny slice of the world we happened to be born into.
Take something as simple as eating with your hands. Some people find it bizarre, uncivilised, even. But didn’t everyone once eat with their hands? What changed? Was it a specific event? A hygiene revolution? A marketing campaign in favour of cutlery? Or was it simply the lower classes copying the upper-class elites, as they always do, until the original meaning was lost entirely? Nobody questions it. It is just how things are done. But “how things are done” is never an answer. It is an excuse dressed up as tradition.
The one thing history teaches us, if we care to listen, is that context matters. But how much context? Go one layer deep into the Israel-Palestine conflict and you have a land dispute. Go two layers and you find colonial borders drawn by strangers. Go three and you uncover the Cold War chess game between Russia and the US that destabilised the entire Middle East, which in turn fed terrorism across the world, which in turn shaped the politics you vote on today. The more layers you peel, the more there are. There is no bottom. There is only more.
Buddha said, “Desire is the root cause of all suffering.” And if you look around, he was not wrong. The person who has more money is no more and no less happy than the one who barely has enough to eat. This is not an assumption, it is arithmetic. Everyone has their own fights. The sources differ; the weight does not. The one without enough food is consumed by the stress of finding the next meal. The one with abundant wealth is consumed by the fear of losing it, of losing the power, the status, the lifestyle, and yes, eventually the meal too. One sleeps in a mansion. The other on the footpath. Both lie awake.
Everything is relative. Your pain, your privilege, your perspective. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you stop judging the world through the only lens you were handed, and start building new ones.
