Mastery

I encountered a homeless man yesterday who was, as they say, living his best life. And it occurred to me (likely much later that it should have) that a number of the homeless people that I've met seem a lot happier than one would expect, given their circumstances. I think that a lot of this is that I haven't encountered that many people who strike me as desperate to changer their circumstances. Their situations are less than ideal, and they'd say as much, but they'd managed to find a mastery of them that many other people haven't when it comes to their own lives.

The man I met yesterday was one such. When I asked him questions about how he dealt with the cold or if he was getting enough to eat, he had ready answers for me, because he knew these things. Rather than having rehearsed or practiced his answers, he laid out the mastery he had gained over his circumstances. And I think I envied him for that.

Of course, most of it is quite unenviable. Being homeless, even in a relatively clement environment like that here in the Seattle area requires a level of mastery that having a safe home and a warm bed does not. This was a man who understood that keeping his possessions safe meant keeping them with him. That being able to remain out of the elements required always being willing to move to a place where the elements could not reach him. The mastery that I so admired him for had been forced upon him, as a condition of his survival.

Still, it was a burden that he bore with a smile and a laugh and a sense of optimism that seems rare in the circles that I commonly move in. There are people who would say that it's due to a lack of the same responsibilities that hound the rest of us, and I suppose that I can't really argue with that. But I would contest the idea that the the homeless people that I've met are, or have been, irresponsible. Once, I was in Seattle's Pioneer Square neighborhood with a large bag of Arby's sandwiches that I was passing out, and the homeless people I handed them to would often call over a friend, asking "Hey! You ate?" They'd hand over their sandwich, and only then turn back to me to ask if I had another one. They took better care of one another than, I think, many of the rest of us do. They shoulder responsibilities that American culture more broadly seems to be wary of.

I think the thing about hardship is that it eventually erases the fear of hardship. When I worry about my future, it's because I worry about my ability to endure hardship greater than what limited amount I have already known. What I understood from speaking to a homeless man on the sidewalk in a strip mall was that he didn't fear the hardship that he knew was going to come the next day. And this granted him a freedom that made him seem happier and perhaps even freer than I understood myself to be.

And I think he understood what his life was, the way it was in the moment, and what is was going to be going forward, in a way that I couldn't, or at least didn't. He understood, much better than I, what he needed to master in order to manage his life. True, his circumstances where much more constrained than mine. But I don't think that he would have chosen that, if the choice had been entirely his. He was proving himself adaptable, and perhaps that's why I need to do as well.