Recently I have had cause and pause to think about problems and in particular what maketh a real problem in our lives.
I left last Monday to travel to Paris for my birthday. Frequent flyer points were used. This signifies an awful lot of economic activity that I have been in a position to undertake. Granted, I have worked and on occasion quite hard to earn those points. But to have a job that paid me money, is in the majority of the world not a privilege people are afforded. This is a first world privilege.
I can also take for granted (and do) running water (to wash my travel frocks and jocks). I can take for granted (and do) the real and shitty factory work my Greek migrant parents had to endure in order for me to get a university education: an education that introduced me to feminism, an insane and almost unnatural love of Renaissance art, to literature that triggers an opiate too sublime to endure, to people my peasant parents could not even imagine looking in the eye, to real and imagined places far greater than can be imagined or dreamt of in your dreams Horatio. This education allows me to totter in stilettos over the cobbled streets of Paris in search of the ghosts of promiscuous poets and adulterous artists, past and present. This ‘higher education’ is a first world privilege.
I can also take for granted my health and oh what a voluptuous and full state my health is in. The Greeks have a wonderful tongue in cheek saying: “Then pasko apo adinamia” which means “I do not suffer from a lack of dynamism”. The inference being that one suffers from a little too much of the good life. I come from a country that has universal health care as one of its major tenets. For all the flaws of our health system it is still one of the greatest in the world. A stint in an overseas hospital very quickly shows this to be true. I have a little green card with my name on it and if I can’t afford to pay for a doctor’s consultation I can be bulk billed. This rosy state of my health is a first world privilege.
This, my journey that has taken me to Paris and soon surreal Spain has been a few months in the making. I remember as a child that planning a trip back to Greece for my parents took two decades. Two decades of dirty, filthy, back breaking physical labor in the taxis and factories of Melbourne in order to make enough money to afford the tickets back to the homeland for a visit. This journey could not even be imagined for migrants of the 1950s and 60s. Yet my parent’s eyes get moist to think that their eldest daughter can live such a charmed life. I know I live this life on the back of their endeavours. I know I live this high life standing on their shoulders. I know my life is a first world privilege.
In travelling over to gay Paree, I missed a connecting flight (yup I got caught up in the impossible vortex that is Heathrow Terminal 3 (old) and Terminal 5 (new-ish). I stood at the British Airways counter and cried (one of the silent shocked cries). I was mute and exhausted. I was alone. I wanted my mummy. It meant that I had to stay in London for a night. My only option was to stay in the airport hotel to make sure I didn’t miss my rescheduled morning flight. It was the Sofitel. I had to pay 175 pounds for this honor. Ouch! But out came the Visa card and in one foul (most heinous foul) swipe it was paid and sorted. I had three baths, munched on some of my mother’s ‘paximadia’ (a sweet cruskety biscuit suitable for fasting), Harrods duty free tea. I slept the sleep of the gods in 1000 thread count sheets and fluffy pillows. In the morning I went downstairs into the correct Terminal 5 and flew to Paris. Needless to say my luggage was missing. No doubt a legacy of a missed flight and different airlines…blah, blah…yawn blah…and now I wait, 2nd day in a row waiting for my previously-missing-now-located-now-being-delivered-at-some-point-this-century luggage in an apartment Parisian films are made of. This is a first class, first world priviledge.
So whenever I think I have a ‘problem’ I will run through the “Is this a first world problem?” filter. If the answer is yes then it is not a problem. Perhaps an inconvenience but not a problem.
Postscript: …and as the Universe will have it, the nanosecond I typed the final full stop to this piece, I hark “le ding dong”…le luggage has arrived. Well, of course. This lesson courtesy of the Universe.