Oftentimes, we have to hit rock bottom before we can appreciate life and the things we have going our way. I was released from “The Hole” about six days ago (I spent 34 days in there). I was kept inside a 6-feet-by-8-feet prison cell, dressed in old prison attire and torn sheets and a paper-thin mattress, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I was fed three small portions of non-nutritive meals: stale cereal and powder milk I had to dilute with cold water; potatoes or rice and mystery meat for lunch most days, and dinner just the same. They came like clockwork. Breakfast at 6:15 A.M., Lunch at 10:30 A.M., and Dinner at 4:15 P.M., and you couldn’t keep any food back for the fourteen hours between dinner and breakfast. The food would be thrown away by the prison guards searching the cells when making their rounds every thirty minutes.
All I could do in “The Hole” was stare at the walls, listen to the cries and constant complaints of the other inmates, pace the three steps back and forth in the crumped cage I was placed in, grab onto the prison bars that look like pool cue sticks standing vertically, three inches apart from each other, to stare at the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, and maybe read here and there a torn up fiction novel shared among the other inmates in the neighboring cells next to me who were going through the same punishment process for breaking a prison rule.
I felt like a dog in a kennel and hoping for someone to adopt me. But it was there that I self-reflect about life every second of the day. It was there that I learned gratitude for the small things I was given, and the small things I had at my disposal. The food I was being fed (I was grateful for it because others may not have anything to eat around the world), the tiny rubber pencil that bent every which way when I tried to write, and the two to three pieces of writing paper I was issued every two days, the toilet paper I was periodically given, the limited yoga exercises I could accomplish in such confined space, the meditation and prayer I did every morning (that’s the time when it was most quiet in the hole), the fiction novel books that enabled me to escape my living conditions for a period of time, and the Bible that kept telling me that everything in life has a purpose and a meaning, even in our suffering.
Now that I’ve been released back into the general population, I am more appreciative of my expanded freedom and the additional privileges I had taken for granted before I went to “The Hole”. I am truly grateful, not just for some things, but for everything, including your friendship.
So on the day you’re reading this, choose to feel grateful about everything in your life. Even the act of waking up and placing both feet on the ground on your way to the bathroom to get ready for the day. There are people at this very moment who are unable to perform such a task. And by the way, you don’t have to hit rock bottom – just like I did for 34 days – to learn gratitude. Smile, your life is worth living.
#freedwinrubis
