I look at our world today and wonder. Have we moved forward or run backwards? I guess the thought that really prompted this post is Dubai. A city of glitz and glamour. A Las Vegas of sorts, if you will, and yet it holds nothing for me. I'm usually an optimist. Nothing? Dubai has to have something? I thought back at a time when Dubai wasn't "Dubai". I was just this city I went to school in and a city I grew up part of my life in. Somewhere I'm smiling at the picnics of the olden days. Driving through dessert sands. Seeing camels here and there. The peace that comes with such memories cannot compare to anything man made that is based on one's income. A conceptual change really when you start viewing people by the make of their car or the size of their home or the purse they carry.
I'm switching gears, sort of, but there was a patient who came to my office. I make it a point to find something complimentary about my patients and to tell them. I look for a nice purse or a scarf and it opens up the conversation. So, a long standing patient of mine came in and we were talking about "stuff" and I noticed her purse. It was a brand I did not know and it looked nice. "Interesting purse," I remarked. "Oh! It's a Furkin!" she replied. "A what? Furkin? Never heard of that." "I call it a Furkin but it's a look alike to a Burkin, but since it's a fake Burkin, I call it a Furkin!"
I asked a bit more. For the ladies in this audience who already know what a Burkin is, you know where this is headed. For those of you who don't know what a Burkin is, well, it is apparently a purse and the starting price is $20,000. Yes, in the thousands, not the hundreds. I still feel spending in the hundreds for a purse is insane and when I heard thousand, I was blown away. Now we know what we are worth or how we are supposed to be judged. I guess you can be a total a$$ and have a Burkin and it's all good. Has our world really come to that?
I've always been philosophical. I've never been part of the rat race. Funny thing is when I wanted to be, I couldn't compete (wasn't wealthy enough). And when I can compete, I could care less to. I could go out today and buy a fancy car and that would be it. It would be me with this ridiculously over priced car and everyone gawking. I could feel like I'm something special but really is that how we operate? I've always been a bit philosophical but going to the Galapagos Islands (oh yes, posts about that trip is coming sometime) has changed me in ways I can't explain. I've changed so much, I can't go back to the old me and it's not bad. This me wants to sit in some uninhabited corner of the world and just watch and experience nature. I return to a world that is so inhabited that we destroy nature to create an illusion of something that can do nothing for one's soul.
Back to Dubai. I miss the cool dessert sand in the evenings, and the endless dessert that offers you neither fame nor fortune but connects you to something that heals you from within. Something no doctor can procure a cure for. Give me some degree of civilization. Not this maze of mirrors where even your compass is a reflection pointing in the wrong direction.
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