envy

In the middle of a mostly very content life, I am occasionally assaulted by envy.  In one moment I'm fine...contented, happy.  And then I witness the prospering in some way of my neighbor and suddenly I feel an insidious resentment that I don't have what they have.  It feels unfair, as though I deserve every good gift that anyone else receives, as though I deserve what they have, whether or not they have the good gifts that I've been given.  It's a serious case of selfishness and greed and it's distressing how quickly I can go from a state of peace to a state of irritability and negativity.

A certain experience when I was in my late twenties that involved washing clothes with a rub board taught me a lesson, and I look back to that experience over and over when I feel those waves of envy that take a day full of color and life and turn it into a gray drudgery because I don't have what someone else has.  The essence of the lesson was to consciously take in the good I've been given and to deliberately let go of the drive to have more.  The essence of the lesson was that gratitude is the key to contentment.  Deliberate gratitude. 

Another person's bounty reminds me that wonderful things can happen at any time to anybody.  I will appreciate the many good gifts I've been given.

                                                                                                                                  --Courage to Change

music

Sometimes you have to watch someone love something before you can love it yourself.  It is as if they are showing you the way.

                                                                                       --Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

My husband loves music.  He hears music everywhere and if no music is actually playing, he hears music in his head.  He hears the different instruments, he hears the difference between this arrangement and that arrangement, he hears the beat and the rhythm and the melody and the bass line and the background harmonies.  He has been hearing music in his head ever since he was very young and in those moments when you can tell that he has drifted away into his own thoughts, it is often into the depths of music that he has drifted.

 

Watching Ruben love music has taught me how to love music.  Since he plays the bass guitar and I've listened to him play with various bands, I've learned to hear more clearly the bass line in music.  Seeing what goes into a band setting up and listening to the difference each instrument makes, listening closely to the lyrics, learning the background and meaning to songs, learning to hear the different chords and the changes in rhythm and the melodies layered on top have all helped me to hear so much more.  Now sometimes I turn the music up very loud when I'm alone and I listen intentionally to hear each of the pieces that is making the whole and I can disappear into that dimension of sound, that place where Ruben goes in his head that I've only just begun to be able to really see. I'm learning to really savor some of what I've been oblivious to because he has helped show me the way.  And on top of all of that, is the mystery of music which even Ruben cannot explain of how certain sounds can move our emotions or flood us with memory or bring us to tears.

So now that Ruben has been showing me the way, I can love and appreciate music and sound far more than I could before and I can drift away into the beautiful depths as well.  And while he has been pointing out the sounds around us, I've been showing him that dark afternoon shadows are really purple and that the white light on the tops of the trees in the morning is actually pink.