From the Cutting Room Floor

            In the process of writing this book, I feel like I have deleted almost as many words as I have written.  I deleted some of them because they were bad, but I deleted others simply because they didn't fit.  Here is an example of something that didn't make the cut not because it was terrible, but because there was no place for it in the book.

            Hong Kong - Of Money Markets and Street Vendors
          
            Allow me to draw a back of the envelope distinction: Hong Kong is a coin with two faces.  The image of a bank is stamped on one side, the likeness of a pushcart scratched on the other.  If you stand on the wharf at Kowloon Bay and look out at the incandescent bar graph that is the city skyline, all you see is money.  White light coruscates off the glass trunks of skyscrapers by day, and runs down them in LED rainbows by night.  Yachts are moored at the quays, yachts circle the bay, yachts return from a day at sea back-lit by the setting sun.  “I feel like I’m in Vancouver,” Todd said as we walked past designer boutiques, through glass-enclosed sky bridges, and into a Starbucks.  One side of the bay is what the architectural avatar of wealth looks like.

            But there is another side of the bay.  Our hotel was located there.  Buildings were smaller.  Buildings were shabbier.  Buildings were held up by bamboo scaffolding that I was afraid to walk under - and not because I’m superstitious.  I’m going to betray one of my prejudices when I say this, but that side of the bay is what I imagined South East Asia would look like.  It's also what I thought it would smell like.  It’s some combination of sweat, soy sauce, unknown herbs, and roasting pork.  It’s a pleasant smell.  This is excessive romanticizing on my part, but it smells like hard work.  It smells like people of less than ample means making the most of what they’ve got.  It smells better to me than the metallic pheromones of money the skyscrapers secrete on the other side of the bay.

            I don’t want to wax lyrical on the dignities of poverty.  Poverty is not uplifting and we more fortunate should not keep people trapped in it by crowning them with the dubious laurels of the noble poor.  There is nothing desirable about a life of poverty, and giving people the tools to lift themselves from it should be a main societal goal. 

         (I don't know why but I can't change the formatting of the next paragraph.  The difference in font is just a glitch).
   

         But there is virtue in a life spent in the pursuit of something other than the trappings of wealth.  You don’t need a shiny car to be worth something.  You don’t need an expensive suit, or a flashy watch, or an alligator-skin briefcase to be happy.  I would suggest that those kinds of accessories are more of an impediment to happiness than a source.  Too many of us carry them around (or pursue them) without realizing that they can easily become glittery sets of shackles.  Poverty is not dignified (though many people do handle it with dignity), and neither is wealth necessarily a ticket to paradise.  I, for one, would like just enough wealth to be my own master, but not so much that I become its slave.

 Money.

 Still a lot of money.  But as good as I could do from my photo stock.

   

        A little sanctimonious perhaps, but then again I also cut it.  More from Make It Stick on Saturday.