Life Lessons
Compassion, connection, and the limits of idealism.
I spent five years working with Crisis, a homeless organisation in London. Through this work I learnt some of the most important lessons of my life.
I learnt that idealism must be tempered with pragmatism; that compassion, empathy and faith in people can be cultivated; and that however distant another person’s experience may appear to be on the surface, we are all but a few degrees from one another.
Crisis was a small organization, fiercely independent, passionately outspoken and deeply grounded in a sense of compassion and social justice. The organization started its life in the basement of a church providing the homeless with food at Christmas. By the time I arrived, the organization had grown to become a year round operation working to reskill the homeless and reintegrate them into society.
The people that Crisis sought to help were the rough sleepers; many of them former veterans, older single men, with drug and alcohol problems, relationship breakdown and mental illness. Broken, lonely men without friends or family, shunned by society as shirkers, good for nothings and petty criminals.
Every year that I was with Crisis, I volunteered to work in the shelters. I would sit and talk to old men, who had been rough sleeping for years, about their hopes and fears and the terror of living on the street. I came to understand a little of how they came to be where they were and why it was so hard to change. I got to know them as people and empathize with their lives. I came to see how even the strongest amongst us are vulnerable and fragile, that there but for the grace of God go I.
To work with the homeless, to campaign and research and write on homelessness, took faith in people and in the possibilities for change. The rough sleepers I saw could be incorrigible types, often seemingly resistant to help. Unpredictable, self-destructive, sometimes violent, occasionally choosing the dangers of the street for the sake of companionship or drugs or out of sheer habit.
All too often the people who were meant to help were the problem, herding the mad, the bad and the vulnerable together in hostels in terrible conditions, exacerbating problems of mental health and drug addiction. Reform was slow and painful, requiring the passion that only idealism can furnish and the pragmatism to understand when to compromise or take the long view.
Many of the toughest challenges in life require this peculiar mix of idealism, realism, compassion and faith. Working with the homeless I learned that we are profoundly interconnected, that one must not succumb to the comforts of idealism or blind oneself to tough realities, but recognise that though the odds of success can sometimes seem unfavourable, faith in the possibilities for good can mean that we win out none the less. They are lessons that have proved profoundly durable.
