Pie

Imagine that all the love, affection, and resources (time, finances, emotional space, etc.) that each of us has is a pie. This pie may be larger or smaller depending on capacity and circumstances in a person’s life. Now, in order to be healthy and satisfied, each person must constantly be consuming an entire pie. But, after eating a single slice of our own pie, the rest of our pie cannot satisfy us or give us any nutritional value. What are we to do?

We must give ourselves the first slice of our pie. This is self-love or self-care. That first slice imbues all of the other slices of our pie with nutritional value. But, after we have consumed the first slice of our own pie, the rest of our pie will give us nothing if we eat it ourselves. We must give the other slices of our pie to other people. Still, we must consume a whole pie to be satisfied, so others must give to us as well.

In a healthy, functioning society and group, it would look like this: each of us eats our own first slice, and after that we give our slices of pie away to others so that each person in the society or group has enough pie to be satisfied. Each of us allots our slices differently depending on how many people we have relationship with, the size of our pie, and the needs around us. Because we are all human and sometimes our pie capacity shrinks unexpectedly or circumstances come up where we might need to allot pie elsewhere temporarily, sometimes people will be hungry, but nobody will be starving and the hunger is not the persistent gnawing ache that is so regularly experienced in our society today.

Because our society is not healthy and functioning. We in America have all this pie, and yet people are literally starving to death. Whole pies languish in the garbage uneaten. Children lick pie crumbs off of floors, hoping to survive another day.

They say all happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Well, there are many reasons this starvation occurs, and I’m sure this is oversimplifying things a bit, but here are some unhealthy scenarios.

Some people are starving because they ate their first slice of pie, but then, instead of sharing the rest of their pie with others, they continued to consume their own pie until there was nothing left to give. This also meant there was no room on their pie plate for the pieces that others might give them. Think of the super wealthy billionaires who keep accumulating and hoarding wealth or spending it to buy more and mansions and other items that are beyond what they could possibly need or use. Because the pie eaten after their first slice is nutritionally worthless to them, they are starving even though they are consuming an entire pie. They try to grow the size of their pie so that they have more to eat, for they recognize their own starvation, but no matter how big the circumference of their pie tin grows, it is not enough. Often these people have been betrayed in the past, and they never again want to feel the gnawing hunger that came when promised pie was stolen from them. People in this situation know that they need a whole pie to live, and yet they cannot trust that others will give them the pie that they need, so they attempt to consume their own pie instead of giving it to others.

Some people are starving because they did not eat their first slice of pie. Taught by religion and the ideals of “selflessness” that giving to yourself should come last, they see the glaring needs of the world and try to give everyone else their pie without saving any for themselves. Because you must eat your slice from your pie first in order to be able to absorb the nutrition (affection, value) of the pie received from others, every other slice that they get from others is unable to satisfy them. Additionally, the pie they give to others often loses its value as well because pie that is tainted with obligation and resentment not edible in the long run.

Some people are starving because they are the “throwaway people.” Not chosen to be a person that others save a slice of pie for, they are given the leftover slices if leftovers there are. Because our society is not functioning, there are not always enough leftovers to go around, and so these people are nearly always hungry, and sometimes they starve to death. If they are lucky, they can find enough people in their lives to get enough pie to stay alive, but because they are not guaranteed pie, they never know if or when or how much they will be able to eat. If these people have self-love and can eat their first slice of pie, they are at least able to eke out an existence, but often those who are constantly told by society that they are only worthy of leftovers find it hard to even eat their slice of their own pie. Tragically, they have plenty of pie to give, but it is not always taken, and so it is wasted, left to rot in the trash and thrown away.

After years of operating in any of the above scenarios, people often don’t know how to give pie to anyone at all. Whole pies go uneaten because people forget how to eat them, how to give them to others, and how to receive them from others.

There are other scenarios as well, the complications of everyday human existence. People who don’t have enough people in their lives to get a variety of slices often have trouble getting their whole pie plate filled. People who try to give their pie to too many people often don’t get as much pie in return as they give out. People have different commitments and capacities, so it can be hard to give and receive pie even in the healthiest situations.

Still, I think as a society we can do better.

The difficult thing about this is that, for everyone or anyone to have enough pie to be satisfied, the cooperation of society is required. Each of us must eat our first slice from our own pie and then give every other slice away to other people. Each of us must make sure that there are no “throwaway people” in our midst and that everyone is chosen to be guaranteed enough slices of pie to fill up their pie tin. This isn’t easy by any means. Aside from overcoming the toxic mindsets that prevent us from eating our own first slice of pie, we must somehow trust a society to supply the pie we need in order to survive even though it has consistently shown us that it will not supply the pie we need in order to live. We must not become like the hoarding billionaires who try to eat our own pie without getting any value from it. We must learn to interact healthfully with those who have different-sized pie plates than us. We must learn to value the various flavors of pie that other people offer us.

We cannot force others to give us pie. Pie given in obligation or coercion and tinged with resentment is not satisfying and will not save us from starvation. We can only eat our first slice of pie, give away the rest of our slices, and hope that someone will genuinely and willingly care enough to feed us pie from their own pie plates.

So many of us are starving. I think we could do better. But we can only do better if we all take a leap of faith together and choose willingly to give and receive in as healthy a way as we can, even though it’s terrifying. I saw a quote online recently, though, which says to do something that terrifies you every day. Well, we all need pie every day…