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Today's
Meditation:
Today
offers us another idea about perspective and attitude, two
things that necessarily go hand-in-hand in our
lives. It has to do with how we see things that are
a part of our lives--do we look at difficulties as
terrible obstacles that we can't overcome, or do we see
them as wonderful opportunities to grow, to learn, and to
develop our character?
We are full of potential, of chances and opportunities to
grow into the people we were meant to be when we were
created, and we find our chances for growth in the
challenges that we face. We don't even need to
overcome every challenge, or win every battle, to learn
and grow from it. We can become better and stronger
people through the act of facing the challenges in the
best ways we know how, with equanimity and balance, with
purpose and calmness.
Some of the people I teach with wonder that I don't get
upset when challenges come up. In my life, though,
I've searched out challenge after challenge, including
joining the Army, pursuing graduate degrees, buying cars
that needed fixing up, arranging trips abroad for
students--partly because I've known that in accepting and
embracing these challenges, other challenges that would
come up in life would seem much easier to deal with when
they did show up. So some of the things that happen in
school that seem very difficult to others seem rather
simple to me, mostly because I've been fortunate enough to
have faced many more extreme challenges and obstacles in
my life.
Most people avoid challenges because they see only the
short-term unpleasantness. But if we can start
looking at the long-term benefits of going through that
short-term unpleasantness, we can see that Charles makes
sense--we can only reach our potential by coming to grips
with the difficult, instead of trying to build our lives
around the simple and the easy.
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