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Everyday Life Choices
Are the Poor Allowed No Luxuries?

Here's a couple of my everyday life choices:

1) $5 toward the overdue payments for the roof over my head or $5 for one more pack of nicotine sticks to squelch some stress and assist in keeping my sunny spirit alive.

2) $5 toward the overdue payments for the roof over my head or buy my dogs a bag of food to keep my reason for caring alive.

Unless you've lived with the reality of being a month or two behind in everything that keeps a roof over your head, your choices would probably be different from mine. You may be thinking I should surely apply the $5 bills to my past due rent or utility balances. I should give up my bad, unhealthy habit choices. I should give up my dogs. I should give up anything other than those items absolutely necessary to sustain life.

I want you to know that doing what you think I should do is exactly what I did for a long time. Doing this caused me to fall, falling farther from living than I've ever fallen in my adult life. Never mind that I was currently poverty stricken, more so I'd become poor in spirit. Depression took hold and I could no longer do anything to better myself or my situation.

Worse yet, I no longer cared to do so...until...until I looked at the dog laying beside me and the dog laying at my feet. I cried with them. I apologized to them. I got up, got dressed, selected a small keepsake from my life, got in my car, drove to the nearest pawn shop, sold the item, drove to the nearest convenience store and bought myself a "buy 1 get 1 free" pair of not-my-usual brand of cigarettes, a bag of my dogs' least favorite dog food, and put a few dollars into my gas tank. I returned home, fed my girls, lit a cigarette and proceeded to shower and dress myself for yet another afternoon of job hunting. Ten job applications later I returned home to cook myself yet another packet of ramen noodles. Today's flavor of choice would be chicken.

I settled in front of my computer to do something constructive with another sleepless night. I'd spend it chatting with my family-by-choice, my cyber family of friends. I'd vent a little, write a poem or piece of prose, and I'd surf into websites of the known and the unknown, "spreadin' a bit o' sunshine" into the lives of others. For this is what I do. This is what I've done for years - provide for others the thought that, "There's always a bit o' sunshine to be found peekin' out o' the clouds." And I believe the sunshine has always been, or will

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