Positive Change

When I was a little kid, all my big plans were for my family. I would build a nice big house for my parents. I would start a business for each of my brothers and sisters, so they might not have to suffer a difficult life. It didn’t matter what little would be left for me.

Upon growing up, my focus slowly veered away from my family. My plans changed. I became more self-centered, more interested in my own wellbeing. I wanted to find my ideal life partner – someone beautiful and intelligent and, preferably, well educated and from a good family.

As I got older, my thinking changed yet again. Why should the quality of my life experience depend on other people? Finding a perfect life mate was fine, but I should be complete on my own. I thought I was getting wiser.

Every one of us has plans of things to do that are just too many to be accomplished in one lifetime. Yet if we try to observe the way we spend our limited earthly time, we will be surprised at how wasteful we are of our moments by spending them on trivial pursuits, often without care for the truly important. 

Albert Einstein once said that our life on this planet is only a short visit… even shorter when it’s wasted away on meaningless undertakings.

We waste precious life moments in worrying too much about things that cannot be changed and in not doing what can be done. It’s useless to insist that if only people were different or that if only some events did not happen. Nonsense and impossible dreams are clutters we don’t need in our lives.

We keep on changing our plans, hoping to make our life more stable. We tend to forget that there can be no real stability amid constant change. We tend to forget, too, that what can make life beautiful is not stability, but love.

Our refusal to forgive an offender and our arrogance to ask forgiveness for our own offenses drain us of valuable emotional and spiritual energies. The stone that we do not remove from a fellow traveler’s path blocks our own way as well. A word of kindly counsel that we are always too much in a hurry to say to a wayward youth or the tender affection that we often forget to show to a loved one are opportunities for our own wholeness waiting to be tapped.

Everybody nowadays is set to get the better part of every deal; nobody cares who gets hurt in the process. Life is tough, we say. We have enough troubles of our own to look after a neighbor’s needs. We use this excuse to perpetuate our selfish ways. In the end our fierce competitiveness leads us to our collective damnation, like fighting spiders in a matchbox.

Along with our selfish exchanges, we’ve grown cynical towards one another. Any act of kindness and compassion is viewed with skepticism. Goodness is misinterpreted as weakness, and the expression of pure love as a sign of vulnerability. Sympathy is regarded as a mere show. Nobody believes in nobody anymore.

The mistakes of others quickly spark our indignation. We won’t let the slightest affront pass without retaliation. We have made enmity a virtue. We’d rather be soldiers than be angels. This, as we know, only makes us more hurting. The more grievances we keep, the more miserable we are.

The trespasses that remain unforgiven in our hearts soon become our ailments. Every unresolved grudge we carry creates a certain toxicity that unnecessarily wears out our bodies. It is, likewise, a burden that makes our life an excruciating journey. We poison ourselves with bitter envy by refusing to celebrate with others in their victory.

It takes conscious and honest effort probing into ourselves to know what’s making our life difficult. And it takes humility to accept and to own what we’ll find. We need to cast off our narrow-minded human “wisdom” in order to let our innate divine radiance shine through and light our way.

Life is short. But we can make it full. Life becomes beautiful when we acknowledge our self-created failings and begin to make up for them. We must finally say the kind word or do the kind act that we’ve been thinking about but never made the time for.

As another year is starting, it is a good time to start repairing all the damage we’ve allowed to happen in our life – to start doing that which is right and that which is loving. By reaching out to others, we will release ourselves from the self-constructed prison cells of our own indifference, intolerance, pride and selfishness. This may not make our earthly life any longer – but so much better, so much happier.