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Today's
Meditation:
Sometimes I do look at people and start to envy
them. After all, there are many people in the world
who have many more things than I do, and many people in
the world who aren't dealing with the problems that I
am. It's very easy to see the surface of these
people's lives and get the idea that they have something
that I should envy, that they're so well off in their
situations that I should wish that I had what they have,
or that I was in their situation instead of my own.
But all that I can see is the human side, the material
side of those people's lives. I used to envy a
neighbor because he had a much higher salary than I, which
meant that his family never struggled financially as mine
did. After I knew him a while, he told me that he
and his wife were divorcing, as they hadn't been getting
along together well for several years. His spirit
and hers had been hurting for a long time, but they both
hid it well. And one of the biggest problems that
they had was his job-- it took up much too much of his
time, and even he wasn't happy with it. So my envy
for the lifestyle had been misplaced, for it came with a
price that would have been very, very difficult to pay,
indeed.
I do believe that there's more to what Neale's saying,
though. In the case of my friend, envying his
success was useless because his success really didn't help
him at all in his spirit. The failure of his
marriage was something that I couldn't pity, either, for
it could be that such a thing was just what his and her
spirits needed in order to learn what they need to
learn. And since we are primarily spiritual beings
here on this planet to grow, our soul learning is even
more important than any measures of success or failure
that society can toss our way.
Both of them were okay in the long run. They dealt
with a lot of pain, but then they moved on. His
success at work had cost him and her greatly, and the
failure of the marriage ended up making both of them
stronger and wiser people. So before we go about
envying or pitying, we have to ask ourselves what's the
best for the spirit-- perhaps it's better just to keep an
eye out to see how our friends and acquaintances are doing
so that we can give them a hand if they need it, rather
than focusing on our feelings about how they're doing.
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