The world is full of suffering. How do we find the strength to keep showing up?
How do we handle all the sadness in the world?
I know a lot of people are doing it tough. Covid is creating a lot of struggle and heartache.
Me, I’m safely bunkered away in a fortress of independent wealth. I count my blessings every day for the journey that property investing has taken me on. And in the age of Covid, where people’s livlihoods are disappearing overnight, I’m super grateful for the stability my wealth has gifted me.
It didn’t have to be this way. I came into property investing out of necessity. My day job as an accountant was never going to give me the income and lifestyle that I needed, not as a single mum who didn’t want to be a stranger to her kids.
And so I got into property investing. And I was lucky enough to get into the game just as the property market’s golden run began. Everything I touched turned to profit, even though in those early days I still didn’t know what I didn’t know.
The market gave me room to learn – to learn the strategies that I know teach my students.
But luck played a role there too. I could have cut my teeth in a different market. It didn’t have to be this way.
So I’m thankful every day.
And while I’m safe and snug up here on the Sunshine Coast, I’m still aware of how many people are doing it tough right now.
And not just at a cerebral level. I know it, but I also feel it.
I think this is just the price you have to pay to live life with an open heart.
The sadness of the world is immense. We all suffer through minor or major tragedies. Everyone grieves for the loss of loved ones or their friends or their homes.
It’s hard to look at. It’s hard to let it in. It’s hard to keep an open heart. It’s much easier to cut yourself off, shut-down, and hide-away in distractions and Netflix movies.
But I think this the work we have to do, if we want to live at full-bandwidth.
If we want to be a vessel for the world’s sweetness and the world’s joy, then we need to be a vessel for the world’s grief.
An open heart is an open heart.
I was reminded of this passage from the Talmud the other day:
“Do not be daunted by the insurmountability of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.”
That’s thousands of years old but it could have been written yesterday.
It’s hard to feel into the fullness of what’s really happening here – here on Earth, in the crazy old human experience.
But that’s what we have to do. We just have to do what we can. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. Give it your best and be content that your best is all you can do.
In many ways, this is the key to greatness. The challenge is to hold ourselves against that protective instinct to shut-down and stick our heads in the sand – to refuse to look at the suffering that we all experience.
That challenge is to hold yourself against that, and to live life fully, with an open heart.
It’s humble work.
But there’s nothing more heroic.
DB.