The poverty of being inside riches

Dunno if I mentioned this... an experience I had while walking to John o'Groats... I had taken the coastal path around a bay until I came to wall and a dead end. A style over the wall took me into the wonderful grounds of a mansion with graveled paths tracing their way through endless flowerbeds and topiary. I knew i should not be there, but there was no other way and I simply walked through the garden. I had walked 800miles a short stretch of a kilometer through these grounds was meaningless to me. Having slept rough for weeks, the opulence and grandeur of this place was breathtaking, thoughts entered my mind of relaxing in chairs, sleeping in soft beds, running water, food... it was a paradise.

Eventually I met the owner driving down his drive in a Bentley. "Can I help you?", he politely, but sarcastically, asked. I explained my situation and it seemed i was not the first. He nodded the way up the drive and I made my way onto the main road and continued on my way.

An hour later I was at the crest of the hill that had bounded the northern horizon. I looked back over the mornings walking and far in the distance now was a small square of green. The high fir trees, the topiary and the huge mansion now just a spec in the vast plain between the horizons.

Suddenly and unexpectedly I felt like I the one who was rich. While within the confines of that paradise it had seemed like unimaginable wealth. But now looking at it, in its place in the world, it suddenly seemed so small and insignificant, not much richness at all, and instead the unimaginable vastness of the world seemed the valuable thing. In almost a thousand miles walking I had opened my eyes to the other side of the picture - not the small contents of the boxes in which we live, but the opposite: the vast space that exists outside those boxes. Hording our possesions, heaping up our wealth only makes sense inside the box. This box is bigger than that box, this safe is bigger than that safe. But looked at from the outside, they are all small.

So I hope I might one day have walked a thousand miles amongst people, and seen that really I am small, and what I hord and appreciate about myself when I compare myself to others, is really negligable when compared with the huge space outside myself, which I only recognise when I manage to grow into it - if if I were expanding my borders - but should try to recognise directly. When I am very, very small this place is huge!