Good titles are hard to think of

I’ve been living with my parents in Burlington, Vermont for a little while now, and in many ways my life here is ideal. I have a big, peaceful room, eat home cooked meals every day, and get good night kisses before going to bed. I spend a lot my free time ridding my bike around the city and admiring the amazing view of lake Champlain. I do my homework in quaint, artsy coffee shops, and pick my own organic raspberries at a local family farm. My health insurance pays for me to get professional massages and to consult with a doctor that thinks the same way I do about health and healing. A lot of my closest friends are far away but I keep in touch with most thanks to my cellphone and mac. Sometimes when I come home late from work, I find a juicy juicy mango waiting for me in the fridge.

All these things bring me great comfort and I feel very lucky to have them. But here’s the deal. You know how some children are spoiled? And you can tell they are spoiled because they are not happy unless things go their way, even if getting their way means having to play by themselves? And they cry a lot for seemingly trivial reasons? And sometimes they are a rude, forgetting the importance of being kind to others and trying to uplift their spirits? Well, that is kind of how I have felt lately–like a spoiled child. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit and this is probably funny to people who know me well. But really, I have not been at my best lately and I believe it is because I am not suffering enough.

I don’t really want to suffer suffer. It would be sort of silly to wish for tragic, painful suffering. I guess if God feels that I need to suffer in that way I will try my best to be okay with it. But the kind of suffering I am talking about is a joyful suffering that comes from sacrificing what you want for the good of others. My happiest moments lately have not been sitting in a cafe drinking yummy fair-trade drinks, getting the knots in my back de-knotted by my chiropractor, or catching up with a friend on the phone. Instead, I am happiest when I am visiting my grandmother, listening to her tell me an interesting yet a seemingly endless story, and struggling not to zone out so that she doesn’t get hurt and think that I think she is boring. I am also happy after I decide not to go on a run so that I can clean the kitchen up before I got to work, or when I wake up an extra hour early so that I have time to I can cook a nice meal for some of my friends who are in college and have to eat cafeteria food all the time. The kind of happy feeling I am talking about should not be confused with feelings like excitement and bliss. It’s a kind of tranquil, peaceful happiness. I think one of the reasons why I can’t wait to be a mom is because the idea of revolving most of what you do with your life around trying to provide for your children sounds pretty great.

I’ll leave you with some a couple of awesome quotes from the Baha’i Writings:

“Is any larger bounty conceivable than this, that an individual, looking within himself, should find by the confirming grace of God, he has become the cause of peace and well-being, of happiness and advantage to his fellow men?”

“O Son of Man! Thou dost wish for gold and I desire thy freedom from it. Thou thinkest thyself rich in its possession, and I recognize thy wealth in thy sanctity therefrom. By My life! This is My knowledge, and that is thy fancy; how can My way accord with thine?”

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