Greetings, Swadharma readers! Hopefully summer is treating everyone well, and that the hiatus from the stress of school has proven to be a good opportunity for examining your faith.
I wanted to write a quick note about a couple of different things. First, on happiness: I think that happiness and spirituality are largely interconnected. Put simply, your relationship with God affects your outlook on life, and a generally positive outlook can be all that happiness means. If there’s anything (relevant to this blogpost) that I’ve learned so far this summer, it’s that we are quite in control of our lives and our outlooks. For some people, casting off the “the grass is always greener on the other side” comes naturally – for others, it takes work. Either way, I personally think that appreciating the circumstances God has placed me in and believing that I have a future, a fate, a destiny – that “everything happens for a reason” – significantly improves my own outlook on life and in effect, my overall happiness and well-being. I think this is a useful thing to keep in mind as the school year approaches, where “making lemonade out of lemons” isn’t always the easiest thing to do.
Another thing I’ve come to believe is that God not only comes to different people in different ways, but seems to even reside or resonate within different people in different ways. I’m thinking of some good friends who are extremely religious, and of others who are barely so, at all. I’m starting to think that God works for everyone in such a way that reciprocates how they allow Him to enter their lives. This borders on the abstract and non-sensical, but think of a time in your life when your spirituality was at a much different place than what it is now (if it has ever changed at all): chances are, when your approach to God was different, the way you approached every-day things in your life was different as well.
These insights are coming alongside a flurry of cleaning and organization, a day of introspection and a newfound commitment to self-improvement. I’m somewhat of a procrastinator and stress-ball – and call me weak-minded - but for me, changing these habits seems like a much less daunting task when I think of the support I can sustain from spirituality.
Finally, I’ll end on a nice Swami Vivekananda quote I ran across the other day: “Never think there is anything impossible for the soul. It is the greatest heresy to think so. If there is sin, this is the only sin – to say that you are weak, or others are weak.”
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