Many Atlases

This world is filled with many high-quality people. Many more than we would be prepared to acknowledge. You will see among seemingly ordinary people, qualities you would think only belongs to the so-called super-successful people of the world. You would find a domestic help with an unconditional devotion to do his/her work meticulously, a person struggling with his/her finances jumping in to help someone in crisis, people absorbing bereavement, failure, disease with resilience and fortitude ...

It's just that we have picked up a few of these qualities and created a system which rewards only that small subset: intelligence, ambitiousness, competitiveness, communication skills and may be a few more. While we all struggle to align ourselves to that set of qualities (which, by the way, often turns us into unnatural, unempathetic, cold creatures with a very restricted view of the world) so that we can extract the most benefit from this system we have designed, we must never forget that the qualities which this system has so unfairly left out are also equally signs of quality. They work silently, unrewarded, continuously to make this world a better place, a bit more endurable, for all of us. The actual reason this world exists is also because of so many other people who are holding it up through their little, numerous deeds of goodness -- which this world has so brazenly decided to not count.

We all may be winners or losers in various measures in this system. But let's all be modest. Let's, at least in our personal capacity, not forget to acknowledge and respect any instance of quality that we think makes this world a somewhat better place, regardless of whom we see that quality in.