Privilege
There are things that pass through our sight every single day, yet we rarely allow ourselves to truly see them. We notice them, perhaps, but noticing is not the same as understanding. Most of the time, we simply move on with our lives, too occupied with our own concerns to give much thought to what is happening around us.
And then, occasionally, something catches us off guard. Something so ordinary suddenly feels different. We see it, but this time, we actually see it.
I have always been fortunate enough to have my educational institutions relatively close to where I lived, whether it was primary school, junior school, or college. For most of my life, I never considered this anything worth acknowledging. It was simply a part of my routine. I went to school, came back home, and never had to give a second thought to how I was getting there.
Perhaps that is one of the strangest things about privilege: when you have lived with something for long enough, it ceases to feel like a privilege. It becomes your baseline. Your normal.
We often realize the value of what we have only when its absence forces us to notice it.
Until then, the things our parents quietly provide for us, the comfort, the convenience, the security, can become so deeply embedded in our lives that we stop seeing them as gifts at all.
Today, on my way to university, something made me see this differently.
I don’t live close to my university anymore, but I have the privilege of having a car to take me there. I was sitting comfortably inside, making my way through the city, while it was raining outside.
And then I started noticing the people at the bus stops.
There were students, office workers, and countless others standing under whatever shelter they could find, waiting for public transport to arrive. Some were already drenched. Others were trying to protect their bags, books, or whatever little they were carrying from the rain. There were fathers dropping their children off at schools and colleges, navigating through the same weather just to make sure their children reached safely.
I have probably seen the same thing countless times before.
But today, for some reason, it stayed with me.
Perhaps it was because, for once, I wasn’t merely looking at people waiting for a bus. I was looking at the difference between their ordinary and mine.
For me, the rain was something I watched through a car window.
For someone else, it was something they had to stand in.
And that small difference suddenly felt much larger than it actually was.
It made me realize how casually we can inhabit our privileges. We rarely wake up thinking about the fact that we have a car to take us somewhere, a home to return to, parents who worry about our comfort, or an education whose logistics have been made easier for us.
We simply expect these things.
And perhaps there is nothing wrong with that expectation until we forget that they are not universal.
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Today, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude, not because my life is perfect, but because I was reminded of how much has been made easier for me without me even asking for it.
I felt grateful to God.
And, perhaps more importantly, I felt grateful to my parents.
There may be countless things in life where I can disagree with them. There may be decisions I question, opinions I don’t share, and moments where I genuinely believe they could have done things differently. That is simply part of being human, But there are some things I can never repay them for.
I can never give back the convenience they gave me. I can never return all those mornings made easier, all those journeys made comfortable, all the times they quietly removed an inconvenience from my life before I even realized it existed.
The older I get, the more I realize that perhaps this is one of the ways parents love us, by making certain difficulties invisible to us.
And because they succeed at it, we sometimes mistake their effort for normal life.
Maybe that is what struck me today.
Not that I have more than someone else, but that there are so many things in my life that I have never had to struggle for, and therefore, never thought to be grateful for.
A car ride to university.
A roof over my head.
An easier journey.
A parent waiting for me to come home.
Things that feel insignificant when you have them, but can represent an enormous privilege when you don’t.
And perhaps recognizing our privileges should not end with gratitude. It should also make us more willing to extend whatever we can to someone else.
It doesn’t always have to be something grand. Sometimes it can be helping someone with something that is difficult for them, making someone’s journey a little easier, sharing what we have, or simply being considerate of struggles we may never have had to face ourselves.
We may not be able to change someone’s entire life, but if we can make it a little easier, on whatever scale we can, perhaps that is enough.
Because I believe this is how we build a good society, and eventually, a good nation. Not merely by expecting others to do better, but by recognizing what we have been fortunate enough to receive and finding ways to pass some of that goodness forward.
Sometimes, all it takes is a rainy morning and a window separating you from the outside world to realize just how much of your life has been made easier by someone else.
Today, I noticed.
And today, I was grateful.
