The Syrian refugees wave that has been crashing over Greece for the past few years is something that moves me. I grew up with the stories of my Grandparents, Pontians who were living on the shores of the black sea when Stalin exiled them with a bunch of kids under their armpits to live in the deserts of Kazakhstan.

Always wondered, how that must feel like. To be uprooted, stripped from your property and relocated despite your will; with kids.

Stories of people loosing their close ones during the relocations. People finding each other decades later in some reality shows up to this day.

When they decided to return to Greece, 16 years later, they were treated as unwanted immigrants. Pontians are Greeks for your information. Greece has changed considerably ever since. I like to think that it’s the memories and stories of the hardship that they’ve been through that makes them so empathetic towards the Syrian refugees.

I am incredibly proud for the Greek activists that aid the refugees.

We are on the third memorandum. My people are on the worst possible state I ever remember them on. Some of them fight tooth and nail to remain in Greece and despite their terrible financial state there is one rare commodity which they demonstrate time and time again.

Compassion.

As we grow up, we gain a lot of skills and habits which are beneficial to ourselves and others around us. From social skills, to technical ones and beyond. Unfortunately, we pick up and/or inherit some bad ones as well, that’s life after all. We’ll call those ‘baggage’ and personally I categorize them in two categories; evolutionary, and life baggage.

Evolutionary would be a trait you simply inherited, something primal and useful under different contexts but most likely problematic nowadays.

Life baggage on the other hand is little things you pick up as you grow up. Perhaps an addiction, or a propensity for being most of the time a couch potato. Arguably, some of life’s bad traits may have evolutionary root.

Darkest Dungeon makes a very accurate, in my opinion, representation of life’s character progression. In order to survive(and thrive) we picked up different traits along the way and even though each one of us is taking steps in order to gain more positive ones, not everyone is tackling their negative ones.

Identifying those bad traits is some times hard; we are all very content as we are. Sometimes though, those behaviors can be problematic for our professional and/or personal careers. A healthy amount of introspection is due in this case.

Character development is not only about addition, but about subtraction as well.