Reality is really a sum of an infinite number of realities, all occuring at the same time.
I've come to realise that my reality, my world, the world that I tend to think in terms of when experiencing and judging everything around me, it is just one of many. And it often takes an experience with a reality so different from my own, to shake me right out of it, and make me see that this world is really not just what I think it is. In fact, I don't even know what it is sometimes. I read an article today about a guy who was the first person to make it to dentistry from poly, and I was amazed at how he turned his life around despite losing his father to cancer at 12. He had lost faith in his studies, and when he saw how his mother was putting in hours at a factory to hold the family together, he bucked up.
I guess the story hit home because I've worked in a factory myself part-time in the past, so I know precisely how back-breaking it can be. I had to haul 20kg boxes for hours everyday, and package metal parts with my bare hands, some of which smelled so bad and were so oily and black that the oil stuck to my hands and the smell to my clothes, which got me dirty looks when I took the MRT home after a tiring day at work.
In addition, the supervisor often found fault with me no matter how hard I worked. He would nitpick at the way I did things, and hang around as I did my work, generally being a nuisance and pissing the crap out of me. I wanted to ask him to do the work himself a couple of times, but I realised that was not an option if I still wanted my pay, so I bit my tongue, kept my head down and kept working.
That was possibly the hardest part-time job I ever had, but it taught me lessons I could never have learnt elsewhere. It was probably the first time I'd really mixed it up with people from a totally different class of society. The uncle I worked with though, he kind of adopted me as a son, taking care of me throughout my work there, and he invited me to his home for CNY, along with the other guys I worked together with. His humility and willingness to work hard for his family really left an impression on me, especially when I realised how much nonsense he had to put up with from the supervior, whom we nicknamed "fatty pig".
I was actually quite surprised when I went to his home, because it was a large and new 4-room flat in Punggol, which was extremely comfortable. It was then that I realised that after 20 years of hard work, he had built the life he had always wanted. It was even more amazing considering he told me he grew up in a slum in the Defu Lane area. It made me realise that if you are willing to slog hard enough, you will eventually build your dreams, and those of your children.
How do you make sense of a world where you have people who would give up their lives to build the dreams of others, and on the other end of that very same spectrum you have people who would use the lives of others for their own personal gain?
You simply don't. The world is too much for any of us to ever understand individually, and it is often too easy to get lost in one's own reality and not see that out there, there are a hundred other alternate versions of reality all within the same reality we inhabit.