Under The Sky That Belongs To Everyone
🌱 Dharma #3 How the Mind Invents “Above” and “Below”
Some lives are lived close to the sky.
Others are lived pressed against the ground.
I’ve stood in both places—on a rooftop in New York, a drink in hand, watching the city glow as if it were a promise fulfilled; and on the edge of the Ganges in Varanasi, lying on the wooden floor of a small boat beside a boy who begged all morning and then asked me, softly, whether the sky in my country was just as big.
The same sky held us both.
Some people are dying to be on top of the world. Others live as far from the top as if it were destiny. But how close do we believe we are allowed to stand beneath the same sky?
This letter is not about poverty or privilege alone. It is about how easily the mind assembles hierarchies—high and low, superior and inferior, clean and unclean—and how quietly those ideas shape the way we see one another, and ourselves.
Where Begging Is Ordinary
In India, meeting children who beg was ordinary. At stations, on roads, through car windows—begging moved as naturally as “Hello” to a foreigner like me. No matter how often I said I had no money, my foreign face alone made me look like the richest of the rich: lighter skin, smoother texture, clean and trimmed hair, clean clothes. Apparently (and often, technically), I really was the richest person in certain neighborhoods.