Not too long ago, I was in downtown with some friends when a homeless person named John came up to us and started talking. Some of my friends wanted to give him money, but their deal was that John had to spend the money on food instead of alcohol.

He stated that he would definitely use the money to feed himself, but that he might spend some of it on buying himself a beer. As you can tell so far, John wasn’t very bright.

My friends got John a Big Mac, which although is unhealthy, is still far better than the alternative: eating nothing.

After I started talking to John alone is when things started getting weird. I looked into his eyes as I was talking, but I couldn’t connect with him. At all.

To me, John was not human.

He talked like one, he acted like one, but I didn’t feel like he was one.

There is a certain bar that one can reach to connect with someone, I’m not sure if there is a word for it, but I’ll call it the “basic level of human connection”. This is something that I couldn’t feel with John.

Why could I not connect with him? Because this is someone that has completely given up.


John stopped trying.

The motivation he has to get out of his current life situation is non-existent. Being homeless, drinking alcohol, and doing drugs – this is his reality, and he has accepted it completely.

The problem here isn’t that he accepted it, it’s that he was missing the 2nd part of that phrase. When we face a challenge,  “Accept it, then do something about it“.

John has accepted his reality, but chose to not do ANYTHING about it.

Our current misfortunes do not define who we are.

We’ll have our “little failures”, we’ll also have those emotionally-draining and ego-crushing failures that’ll leave us wondering if we’ll ever find our way again.

We can’t avoid them, but what we can do is learn how to pick ourselves up, and move forward.

“Bruce, why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.” – Alfred, Batman Begins

You can follow me @Marwanalshafei where I spark rainbows within people’s subconscious and make the world go round n’ round.