Sometimes I can feel myself grow.

(this is who i was)

(this is who i am)

(this is who i want to be)

You know those little spongy things that start out really tiny and then you put them in a glass of water and they grow bigger? They squish up against the sides of the glass and you think they’re done growing, but if you put them in the bathtub, they will get even bigger? It’s like I just got put into a bathtub and realized that I have so much more room to grow. I feel like I’m outgrowing my clothes. I mean, as a person, I’m just taking in so much that I don’t even think there’s room for it all in my head (hopefully the overflow doesn’t go to my hips). My current, somewhat narrow worldview and understanding of things literally can’t even keep up with everything my mind is learning. What do you do when this happens?

Well, you buy new clothes.

I don’t know exactly when this process began. But if I could draw it on a graph, it would look something like a series of exponential curves, with each one jumping higher than the next. Slow growth at first, then all of a sudden something happens and my knowledge and understanding shoots through the roof. Something of this sort happened roughly everyday in India, but, as is often the case, the first exposure was the most dramatic.

I had been in India for about 12 hours, and had already been to a government-subsidized slum and a shopping mall, categorizing two extremes of wealth in Bangalore.  By chance, we also stopped at an open-air market where the rich and the poor intermingle seemingly peacefully, to the untrained American eye.  It was late in the day now and I was in a state of sensory overload, mind swirling and not knowing whether to feel pity or anger or pure exhaustion.  Our group settled down outside under some trees, sitting in a circle, sipping on tea, and preparing to debrief the day.  

Then R began with this question: Why is there poverty?  Immediately, I rattled off the textbook answers: lack of education, lack of food and water, lack of good credit.  He smiled patiently, knowing that what he would say over the next few weeks would open my ignorant mind.  “You are doing very well describing poverty, but I asked why poverty exists in the first place.”  My mind races.  A lack of education increases poverty, but a person isn’t educated because he doesn’t have the money to attend school.  The same is true of a lack of food, a lack of good credit, etc.  The very things that cause poverty are also the outcomes of poverty.  Poverty is self-perpetuating.  Good, another characteristic, but still no answer to the question.  It stuns me that, of all the times I have heard about poverty and thought about poverty, even cried about poverty, I have never been challenged to consider what causes it.  In my world, it simply is, and although it requires my action to do something about it, it has never required my action to prevent it.

“So, why is there poverty?”  Silence.  I don’t know.  

Maybe it is the sheer realization that I have been living without real knowledge of something so integral to my plans, hopes, and dreams that stuns me.  Perhaps it is that moment, that feeling, that always stuns me in this process of growth—to use terms from my English vocabulary, it is the anagnorisis: the moment of critical discovery.  In literature, the anagnorisis is always followed by the peripeteia: the subsequent change in thoughts, feelings, or behaviors.  So what did I do?

I got myself a new wardrobe.