It had been a year since I had seen Ayah. Our last moments together were in Prague, on the frozen mouth of the Charles River, the air still with fallen snow. Now we were in the Bay Area on a road trip to her boyfriend's weed farm (a multi-million dollar operation that later burned to the ground). We decided to stop in the park to stretch our legs before the long drive.
We walked slowly and Zen-like as we spoke, and I stopped to buy water from a vendor. When I turned around, Ayah was gone. I continued to walk on, I was unphased and unbothered. After traveling Europe and sleeping in the same bed for months, I understood and accepted her nature. She was a free bird who sprang from the nest of togetherness into the open sky of the world. She left often but always returned.
Thirty minutes later, Ayah ran up behind me. “I made a new friend, want to meet him?” I agreed and we walked through the trees, past a crowd of university students. I thought Ayah would introduce me to one of the liberal arts-looking kids with long hair and square glasses, but she continued to walk to the edge of a pond.
Under a scrawny elm tree was a makeshift tent, and an older man sat outside it. He had a thick gray beard and his cheeks were marked with varicose veins. His body was overweight and lumpy, his thinning hair was balding, and his sweatpants were streaked with dirt.
“This is my new friend Rob”, she told me casually and took a pipe from his hand. She lit it and exhaled, everything smelled like sativa. He smiled at me and I smiled back. Ayah’s new friend was a homeless man living in a tent in the Bay Area.
Rob was one of the people I avoided eye contact with on the street. He was the person I walked around as if contaminated. Throughout life, I had conversations with sex workers, gangsters, and inmates, but never a real conversation with a homeless person. I was ashamed to admit that people in Rob’s situation, I pitied and feared.
Pity does not arise from a place of love. Pity is a perverse form of sympathy. Sympathy is wanting to extend oneself, it is an effort. Pity is passive and cruel in its inaction and hierarchical nature. Those who are pitied, are those more vulnerable than we are and we feel bad for them but glad for ourselves.
Looking into Rob’s blue eyes, I felt a madness at my callousness. I was on the edge of an explosive rage, at myself and the profoundly numb society I was an essential part of.
I was in a city of tech giants, funneling billions of dollars into “the future” while the present situation is that thousands of people in this city cannot eat. The system maintains itself from this collective apathy, where humans like Rob live without the support of a roof and others don’t care.
I was a citizen of the wealthiest nation in the world known as “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But freedom is not free if it’s reserved for a select few.
There was the “functional” population on the hamster wheel of doing and earning, and the “nonfunctional” population living on the margin, and the divide between us was large and freakishly apparent. This rift turned the “non-functional” people purposefully invisible. We close our eyes to what we don’t want to see. And this blindness is a perpetuation of the problem.
There are little conversations about things we agree are important. Military spending, and its $877 billion budget from the last year, is what it is because it’s what we value. Policy agendas for helping the homeless are defunded and debated. There is a system of priorities that debases our humanity. Rob was the personification of a problem ignored. But now he was in front of me, eye to eye.
All my previous interactions with homeless people had been helper/helpee, where I am a “conscious citizen” or a “good samaritan” who slows down to buy them a meal or give them five bucks.
Now the tables had turned, and Rob was giving to us. He offered us his weed, and he wanted us to feel comfortable. We were not attempting to save him or fix him, or put him below us through hierarchical helping. We were just there with one another.
It was as if Ayah didn’t notice our differences, and I couldn’t tell if she was delusionally naive or radically deconditioned. If she had looked at Rob through the typical lens of homeless more than human, all pre-imposed fears of the homeless would run through her mind, and cause a cognitive barrier to connection.
The common homeless narrative is one of mental illness and potential violence, which was sometimes true, but not the general case. About 30% of homeless people suffer from mental decline, which is the predominant reason they end up on the streets.
Ayah just saw Rob as a nice guy to talk to and share some herb. This humanization or naïveté Ayah had, (or maybe a mix of both) was inspiring. Rob was no threat and there was benevolence in his gaze. We sat together cross-legged outside his dilapidated tent, swollen like a punched in the eye from the rain. We laughed and chatted easily.
It was so painfully simple, that this is how gaps are bridged; you sit across from someone different from you and you listen. And by truly listening, you see that you are mostly the same.
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