All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter

Sometimes, certain questions just pop randomly in my head. I'm in the period, when my peers are getting married, having children, creating their own homes, working real jobs ... The word success is thrown around a lot over cups of coffee by those who are yet to attain all of that. But what does it really mean? Dictionary.com defines it as this:
 1. achieving or having achieved success.
2. having attained wealth, position, honors, or the like (1)

It doesn't make sense to me, because none of the above seems relevant to the way I perceive people. There has to be more to it. I want to know whether someone is a good person, how much have they contributed to their community, do they have integrity, are they honest, do they treat people with respect ... It's something that can't be measured with money, material possessions or status in society. The easiest thing is to look at outward marks and label people accordingly: successful, loser, shy, quiet, life of the party ... It does great injustice to people who may not be up to society's standards. There is an excellent article in the New Yorker called Suffering Souls. The main focus are psychopaths, but it also mentions the following: "The most agreeable vocation for psychopaths, according to Hare, is business. In his second book, “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” written with Paul Babiack, Hare flirts with pop psychology when he points out that many traits that may be desirable in a corporate context, such as ruthlessness, lack of social conscience, and single-minded devotion to success, would be considered psychopathic outside of it." (2)

I found it interesting because you run into these traits again and again in the newspapers while reading about heads of companies, managers and the like, whose crimes are slowly being uncovered and carry the blame for the current financial crisis my country is still struggling with. But they are also the ones who are considered successful, the ones who made it, the ones who have it all. Why would anyone want to aspire to benefit from the suffering of other people, from lying, from cheating, from stealing? Is this the legacy we are leaving behind for our children?

This is why I find charity and volunteering so important and I was angered by comments under the article of a national newspaper, which was talking about those two topics. People were writing things such as: "Why would I do anything for free?; Why would I help someone if nobody did anything to help me?; I will raise my children to take care of themselves, not to do something for free". You can't confuse volunteer work with unpaid internships, they are two completely different worlds. 

It broke my heart. I always found volunteering very enriching and I never thought about getting something in return. There were times, when I was grateful to be able to have the opportunity to do these things and I learned a lot from it. I remember the time last year when I was having German lessons with two Syrian refugees, who were a couple of years younger than me. I had plenty of free time and I've been following the war in Syria for quite some time, so I signed up as soon as I saw the ad for volunteer German lessons for refugees. They were Syrian Kurds, one of them was from Aleppo, where the main front-line is right now. 

 It was a very precious and humbling experience for me. I might share my knowledge but those boys showed me what courage is, what does it mean to have hope, when the world is falling apart around you. They lost everything. Their home, their friends, they got separated from their families, stuck in asylum seekers home with little to do, but wait. But one day, when I asked them, if they're happy, they looked at each other and one of them answered: "Of course we are. Why wouldn't we be? Life is good, we have everything we need." I had tears in my eyes when I heard this. They remained hopeful and optimistic in the aftermath of a senseless, bloody war that took their youth away, but they still had dreams for the future. Volunteering matters because you can learn many precious lessons and they are one of those things that you can't put a price on, it goes beyond that. 

Our paths went apart after a while, but I will never forget them and I probably learned more from them than they did for me. They will always have a special place in my heart, for showing me the way to something better, the way to happiness and fulfilment. For me, they are the ones who are successful.

Sources: 
- 1 : http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/successful
- 2: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/11/10/suffering-souls