I often think of these famous words of Viktor Frankl: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.
They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Paradoxically, it is often the least fortunate who are the most generous. Perhaps their poverty attunes them to the preciousness of what remains: breath, life, senses, love. Their example can pierce the tendency of affluence to forget how quickly one’s blessings can disappear. The truth, though, is that sooner or later they all disappear.
To read the rest of this essay, Privilege and Fortune: A Confucian View, visit https://buff.ly/3OIcR8B.
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