poverty is not a vice

i see some good in her, but i also see the bad. maybe not bad, maybe it's weakness. she wants an easy solution to everything. she wants others to feel sorry for her and offer help. it has come to a point where she is expecting it and when others do not stop to offer her help, then she wonders about the goodness of people.


i have to wonder... what about you? why aren't you helping yourself?


i have learned that helping people is a double edged sword. often it is enabling them to do nothing and expect others to give them things. this is an easy trap to fall into. i recall my first job at a factory. i worked night shift which was 12 hour shift of hard labor. we each were resposible for one furnace of which we had to take all of the contents out every fifiteen minutes. the contents were about 12 stacks of processed chemical each weighting about 20 pounds. some of the experienced workers were very good and fast. they were able to accomplish this task in about 5 minutes which gave them about 10 mins to rest. you needed the rest because in the furnace room it was close to 100 degrees. it took me about 10 mins and gave me about 5 mins to rest. so, once in a while this one particular guy would stop and help me so i can get a little longer rest. the problem is that i started to expect him to help and when he didn't i started to get upset.

this is where this trap of expecting others to help you and feeling entitled to receive help when in fact there was absolutely no reason anyone should have helped me. it was my job to do my task and we got paid to do it. he didn't get paid extra for helping me. it was out of goodness of his heart that he helped and yet, i resented him for not helping all the time.

it is important for each of us to stand on our own two feet and do what you have to do, not cry and complain in hopes that someone will give you something for free.

“‎Honoured sir, poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkeness is not a virtue, and that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary as I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself.” - fyodor dostoyevsky