When you drive in the cheapest cabs, you get a steady flow of business—from the poorest people in town. For twelve hours a day, the walking wounded rode in the cab. Their business paid for my long day of driving and paid for my life at college, but the endlessness of their poverty felt hard to bear. Their poverty didn't simply manifest in their lack of money and insecurity of their material lives, but in the choices they made within the limits of that material life. They came and sat and talked or remained silent and sometimes sleeping in the back of the cab. They came and by their own words or through discussions between passengers, they were more than poor and more than desperate for many other reasons. They were ill and often from the way they lived. Diabetes 2 distorted many lives. Others practiced sexual work, people of both sexes. Others pimped and battered those workers. Broken family remnants showed all the despair of want and need for things beyond their ability to grasp. Single mothers, some with numbers of children with an equal number of fathers, rode often to emergency with one or another child. People who lived dependant of drugs or alcohol or both sought desperately for some relief even in the early hours of the morning. Some people spoke about deaths among their family and friends. Some spoke of causing their own deaths. Almost all expressed desperation, of a feeling of need, of an endless dispossession and deficit. That wanted and needed something in their lives to change the form their lives had taken, to find something beyond the form they had inadvertently chosen. They felt an undifferentiated need for something they couldn't quite name.
The talk and the sense of this suffering became a burden for me. I would get home after the long day and feel quite stunned and confused. By that point in my life, I had chosen to see human nature as positive, essentially good, and hopeful as I do now. I made that choice after realistically seeing the many faces life produced. These people seemed to carry none of that sense of life or of themselves. They weren't bad people, but they seemed bereft of hope, bereft of any choices aside from the ones that repeated the patterns that brought them into such a steady state of grief. I grieved for their grief and worked to understand, to make sense out of the pattern I saw. I did not want to judge them however temping that felt. Just as the child working with the toy that offered too many pieces for the child to find form, I saw and lived with all these fragments of humanity all day long, and I couldn't find a pattern, a form that made any sense. I felt my compassion stirred, and I worked at opening that compassion to my passengers, yet I felt oddly confused about the suffering in which these folks lived.
A form and meaning came to me quite simply as such things do. I entered a labyrinth of thought, wandered around a good deal in the complexity of my own thinking, and in the end, I came out very close to where I began. In the end is often the beginning. I began by seeing the enormity of their need, and in the end, I saw that the demanding and ever unsatisfying drive and compulsion behind all that conduct was the simple and primary need we have encountered many times before: unconditional positive regard.
All their lives they felt this very personal, non-material need. It works as a spiritual need in that it is not material and cannot come from the material. In their lives as experienced, all needs were hungers and all hungers were fed by the material. Indeed, we often mistake our non-material needs as hungers for the material. The less we know of the spiritual, non-material, answer to needs, the more we will feel them as material hungers. The more we feel them as material hungers, the more passionately we go after material responses to that hunger. That includes all forms of sensory exploration and exploitation: food, drink, drugs, money, work, distractions of all kinds, and the general abuse of ourselves with emotionless sex. We do it to ourselves. They did it to themselves. I've done it to myself. The rich can adopt such a meaning perspective as much as or more than the poor.
What other answer did they have for their hunger, their need? They had none that they knew about, none but the meaning perspective that told them to feed all their needs with the same material answers. Those answers did work, for a while, but then the need returned unanswered. When these answers did not work, the emptiness within them would grow. Unanswered needs tend to get more and more unanswered and more and more needful. Such seemingly material needs look for answers through our identity and our ego, those elements of our being that interact most fully with the material world. That distorts our view of ourselves, and with that distortion our unanswered needs grow and need more and more feeding, more attention. Our relationship with the becoming self suffers. We suffer as did my friends in the back of the cab. My compassion for them was well founded in our shared dilemma, in our shared need as vulnerable, very human beings.