gratitude - the next day

Today I am mostly thinking about how grateful I am to not have to leave the house, for anything.  Sure, I could go and pay a bill or shop for fresh food.  Not going to, though; just staying here and packing and tossing and eating from the pantry, and playing mah jong on Facebook.

So, between games I was closing my FB thing and say a quote from one of the spiritual, quasi-spiritual, feel good, empowerment places I like.  Mostly platitudes (which I like very much anyway), but sometimes there is something so powerful and relevant to whatever is going on in my life that it makes me pause.

Truth be told, if you are paying attention to your life, practically anything you come across can fit into the stuff that fills our lives, especially if is something with which we are struggling.

So, anyway, this one struck me in relation to my community meal experience yesterday.

Do not let the behavior of others, destroy your inner peace.
Dalai Lama

I am hoping that is what I rose to then.  Yesterday.  I really tried to put myself into the shoes of those I encountered, especially the woman who spoke rudely to me, maybe only dismissively because she believed me to be a poor person, and whatever she assumed that to mean.  I was at least partially successful because it did not upset me, only sent me along to think about my life and my work.  Then, when I saw it happening to other poor people at our table and around us. 

Really pretty cool, coming across that quote.  I have a friend who has always believed that my life would be much better if I read the Dalai's writings; same thing for Thich Nhat Hanh.  I never got around to any of their books because I was not all that interested.  Truth is that I have come to think that I have been too absorbed in navigating my own life to read much of what other people have written about the higher elements of life. 

Regular self-help books, man, I have read so many of them, constantly searching for something that would help me to have a less stressful and dangerous life.  Perspective makes this so easy to see, although not so clear to make up for all those decades of looking in the wrong places.  Given the breadth of subject matter in those books, I never, not even once, even close came to choosing a book about domestic violence.  Interesting.

But, back to the Dalai Lama.  I know who he is, fairly familiar with the political aspects of his life and work, not so much anything else.  So, it was nice to find this quote today.  It helps me.