Not many people take the metro in the early hours of the morning. I like to go to work during those hours because I don’t like crowds, pushing-and-shoving, and I must say that I hate the smell of perfume and sweat mixed together. I also go early because I like to be the first to drink coffee at the office before my colleagues arrive and before the phones start ringing.
During the early hours when the metro wagons are half-empty, I like to sit in a corner and look at the earlybirds, try to find out for myself the reason for them getting up that early, try to foretell what kind of people they are and prove that I’m right with my baseless guesses.
The first beggars of the day appear in the half-empty metro wagons and are usually children. I always give the ten drams and think about their past and future. Don’t get the wrong idea: I don’t think about them, but rather their past and future. I don’t care about who they are, but I do think about where they sleep and where they wake up. When I say “Past”, that’s exactly what I mean. How did that person wake up? Which street did the beggar cross and how did he make it to the metro station?
They pass by passengers, as if they’re swimming in an aquarium and the songs they sing are not heard well, they sing the wrong lyrics, bad melody, in other words, they keep the silence just like in an aquarium. Nobody, not even I, can’t say that we care or we’re generous by giving the young beggar the ten or twenty drams. At least I for one don’t think about anything at that moment; I automatically hand him the money and don’t look around me in order to not search for the look of someone encouraging me to do so because that’s simply humiliating. “Look, look, what a generous man.” To be honest, I don’t even care about what happens to the ten drams or if I’ll get it back some day, but I do believe in that. In general, I like the days when I don’t meet young beggars because, as I already mentioned, they force me to think about the past and the future; although it seems as though starting the day off by seeing a beggar and giving him money is a good day. I don’t deny that, however there are melancholic and not too good days as well.
After you hand the young beggar the money, he travels by metro the whole day and it seems as though his small hand becomes the universe; after all, each ten drams (20, 50 or 100) in his hand is not financial aid on our part, but rather something that comes from our hearts. What goes on in thousands of light-years away is the same thing that the young beggar does in our presence and what’s worse, in the underground of the city. If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t give that money. But we do because we’re either generous or do everything we can to be generous, or simply think that we can cover up for our wrongdoings by helping the beggar. Although I consider myself generous, however I don’t think that this is the reason, or one of the other two.
I’m not one to judge the young beggar or brush up on who he is. I respect the fact that there are different types of people and I also respect their right to exist on this planet. I accept everyone, even the stuck-up people, but I prefer to stand back when it comes time to save them because generosity and respect is one thing, however I also have human weaknesses and sometimes I feel like I would like to throw something heavy on the head of the stuck-up. I must say that the stuck-up person is the only person among the variety of people out there who ignites my personal weaknesses and has a negative influence on me.
There are liars, flatterers, prostitutes, dangerous people, thieves, phonies, jealous people…They make me understand them because there is a little of those peculiarities in each one of us. It depends on how well we understand that in order to get rid of those peculiarities. One can’t be a little stuck-up. He’s either stuck-up or not. In the Bible, Noah’s son Kam is considered to be stuck-up. Why was he called that?-just because he laughed at his father who was naked and drunk. If Kam really were stuck-up, God would forget about the Flood and would cry so much until a new flood would start.
I like to talk about variety, but I didn’t plan on writing this long. I wanted to refer to the philosophical meaning of the half-empty metro wagons and the young beggars when I suddenly discovered something for myself. The beggar is a positive stuck-up person, or the opposite-the stuck-up person is a beggar with negative attributes. The rest are passengers who like to go to work by metro in the early hours of the morning or wake up late and try to fit in the full metro wagons by pushing and shoving.
