We met some years ago. The almost daily contact, the communion of several ideals, the empathy developed, all joined what different cultural, social or economic levels might have separated. We respected each other and let a healthy friendship grow between us. We are friends.
 
This friend of mine is physically strong. He has the strength of someone who has dived many times into the river in the past, either for pleasure, since he had no toys to spend his free time playing with, or to look for some coins, which had been thrown into the river by very inferior men who looked very superior and amused. His strength was also developed during the daily eight hours he spent as a worker, first in a factory and now in construction.
 
But together with his physical strength comes the spiritual strength of someone who, when he was still a child, came to the owner of a stationer’s to give back the magazine he had stolen a few hours before, because his conscience couldn’t accept such behaviour. The true strength of someone who was capable of standing up after having fallen, when he was young, into the path of great passions and vicious behaviours. After the correction in prison, came the time of building a simple and honest home, of a person who assumes his human condition with dignity.
 
Our spiritual conquests, when well grounded, are definitive. However, during their process of development, anyone can fail, simply regarding true values carelessly, letting multiple, and perfectly secondary, material solicitations distract us and thereby losing the notion of reality.
 
That might have happened to my friend, when he left his home to live in a small room on the third floor in a narrow street in the old part of the town. He told me it was a good room with a nice view.
We went up those endless wooden stairs, listening to several family arguments, a young man wearing few clothes singing, several radio broadcasts (it seemed that all those people had a hearing problem, their radios were so loud); watching more or less intimate pictures of people who weren't able to live with the least privacy; being watched by several mothers who control who goes up those stairs. We passed through an old door and there we were, in a narrow room with a couch, a chest of drawers, a bed-side table and a chair, all very old and badly preserved. At the window, one could see the roofs and façades of old and very degraded houses.
 
I suffered. A little because of the miserable conditions in which those people lived. But a lot more because I saw my friend quite was mistaken, pathetically trying to adapt himself to a frankly adverse situation. How wrong he was... And what a mistake he was making...
 
A distorted analysis of reality leads us into making mistakes. But when we do, we make, in self-defence, an adapted analysis of reality, in which we include many justifications for our mistakes.
Then… well, then either we have an inner strength to stand up again, noticing (after going down so rapidly and easily) how difficult and slow it is to go up again; or we stay submerged in the lassitude of a life of corruption, only satisfying the small and narrow-minded pleasures of our animal existence.
 
But my friend is a truly strong man and, in this case, he stood up. He set his ideas in order, came back home, found a new job, broke free from drugs, paid his debts, faced reality again.
Time went on and this man is a winner. He knows all his material and spiritual assets were achieved thanks to his own work and will, his capacity for sacrifice, the rationally conducted and persistent effort and the growing steadiness of his own character.
 
He is, and will certainly be, a simple man, an honourable but unknown man for most people, but he is still a fine example for those who like to see beyond materialism. 
 
 

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