Is there anyone in there?

I was asked today what I did when I experienced true beauty and wonder, in whatever awe-inspiring guise it might take. Did I phone a friend and tell them all about it? Did I stop and stare as if I could fix it in my memory? Or did I look around for the means to write it down?
I was asked this as I read through one of the writing handbooks I have taken out the library to start me on my freelance writing quest. I pondered for a moment: I'm not much of a ponderer, if I haven't an answer straight away I tend to think I'm not good enough to find one. But as I watched a program about the way human beings deal with nature's toughest challenges I found my answer quickly enough.
I suddenly found that I did want to write about what I was seeing. For two reasons: I wanted to share the awe I felt when I watched a person crossing what amounted to a tightrope across a torrential, gushing river to feed his family for the day. I also wanted to write a quite different and less beautiful story asking why people in the west were so selfish - I spend all of my time worrying about the money I owe, the things I can't buy, and all the time this guy is taking his life into his own hands to feed his family every day. I wanted to write about the greed of a culture that has made me so worried about 'surviving' that I have borrowed money until I can't afford to pay it back, just so that they can make me feel inadequate again when they intimidate me with their threats of bankruptcy and losing everything I have. What will they take from me anyway? No matter what they do I will have my life. The man over the river doesn't care for finances and empty threats made by money grabbing fat cats; he moves slowly, hand over hand, foot over foot, his only concern is staying alive. I find it ironic that his only worry is the one thing that I can guarantee above anything else: none of my worries will have the power to take my life. Yet I would rather live in fear like him than sit in my comfartable house and worry that one day I might have to move into a smaller place and stop renting DVDs. It's ridiculous when you look at it like that and I feel a huge sense of shame that I live this priviledged life. I was born into it, that is not my fault, but to not even have thought of the futility of it all before now humbles me. I could change my life, but that isn't the point. The point is the system that has sucked me in. The point is the senseless greed, the way we create ownership and place our own values on things that ultimately aren't even real. Debt, money, possessions, they don't really have value. They come and go and we are forced to feel that if they are taken away from us we will somehow cease to be living. But we won't. What can they do if one day we just turn around and tell them we won't accept their values any more, that suddenly the rules have stopped applying? Would the world spontaneously combust? Would we all stop being? No. Life would just become simple. Perhaps it would just be about living.

I didn't realise that when I started to explain what I wanted to write about it was all going to come out like that. I simply wanted to outline the point that I had found the desire to write and to share, that it had always been there. I guess I proved that.
There is certainly a voice in there, but that rant would take a lot of shaping if it were to end up as a story, I know that. I think it is enough to know that the story is there, if I need it.