By Roshan Shah
The other day I was sitting on the floor in a community kitchen at a place of worship, waiting for lunch to begin. A short distance away from where I sat was a hole in the floor. It was perhaps the mouth of a drain pipe that led to a rubbish pit below. If it was that, who knows what filth might have accumulated down there over the years?
As people began filling up the hall, a man came to near where I was sitting. I hurriedly warned him about the hole, thinking that he might like to sit elsewhere. But instead of doing that, he decided to sit very near the hole. He shrugged off my warning in a friendly manner. “I don’t have to sit there forever” he said, or some such thing!
That seemingly minor incident has a valuable lesson for how we can handle the inevitable challenges of day-to-day living. If in the face of every “drain pipe hole” that we encounter we tell ourselves that we don’t have to “sit there forever”, how much easier it might be to deal with them! Knowing that sooner or later all the challenges we face will pass, that they will not remain forever, might enable us to accept them with fortitude, without getting unnecessarily worked up!
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