Walking away

So imagine this: you are there for the first day of your new life. You're 16. You've just been expelled from school. In the night time, you were awoken by your mother crying at the foot of your bed. But she's gone now. Everyone's gone now. Your mum, and your dad, and your brother are at work. Your younger sister, she's still in school. There's no one in the house, and there's no school to go to.

So you get out of bed and you go downstairs to the bathroom – which is in the kitchen – and you plug a little plastic hose into the TOs of the bathtub and you sit down on the cold plastic, and you shower yourself, and you watch the water go down the drain and you say to yourself, "That's your life, that is. That's your life."

And then you get out of the bath and you dry yourself and you're drying your hair and the doorbell rings. And it's your friend from the street, who you've been smoking with for about 6 months now. And he knows that you've been expelled from school and he's really sorry, and he says, "We should go and smoke up."

So now, what do you do?

This is the moment when you realize that to be poor and to want to be rich is a walking away. It is a walking away from the friends you grew up with. It is a walking away from people like you. And you know deep within yourself, in your heart of hearts, these friends won't be okay without you.

But what about you? If you stick around to save him, then who sticks around to save you? – How to live in a collapsing economy - YouTube

Of course, this quote doesn't communicate how painful it can be to walk away. To abandon people to their misery, or pain, or loneliness.

It is easy to make excuses to yourself about such an act, to claim that you are helpless to do otherwise. Unfortunately, I don't lie to myself. Therefore I must choose to abandon.