compassion and conundrum

My week of compassion is over.

Thank goodness! Do you have any idea how hard it is to be nice during the fast? I mean yeah, sure, there are moments of profound spiritual insight, but I get cranky when I am hungry AND tired! Moments of profound irritability. Actually I am mostly joking. I quite enjoy fasting; I think that I jinxed myself the other day, I said that to a few people who I was talking to, and by about three o'clock I had the worst hunger cramps that I have ever gotten during the fast. It was like God had commissioned some one to curl up in my stomach and punch repeatedly just below my ribs for a couple of hours- just to say, 'Oh yeah, how much do you REALLY enjoy it?'. Don't worry, I survived, and continued to smile (grimace perhaps) at the world around me as I hunched over the counter at work.

And that was also the day that my little virtues book was talking about having compassion for oneself. Compassion is such a complex thing. It is a word that people throw around quite freely, but the more that I have tried to focus all my actions and thoughts into a compassionate nature, I have only become more aware of how unaware I am about the true meaning of this virtue. There have been a few instances in the last week where it has come to my attention that someone around me is crying quietly in need of some compassion- and no one seems to be noticing. But even tho I notice, I find myself unable to find the appropriate response.
One of the 'mantras' in the book this week was 'I take time to reach out to those who need help.' And my virtue building self is so young and immature that I am only able to recognize those who need help but reaching out to them to be there when they need to get over a wall in life is... hard! For me.

Something that I have done well tho is that I have not watched a single episode of the Real World since my last blog, but that is partly because it doesn't seem to be on when I am eating in the morning anymore. But also, let us say, that it is some self restraint. I have spent a lot more time reading, and I am almost done 'The World Order of Baha'u'llah' which is a fantastic book, but it has been making me realize how much I don't know- and how important- the recent histories of Islam and Christianity are. Perhaps until I am really studying something in school again, I will do some of my own studies on those topics. Perhaps.

Recently the thought of going back to school in the fall has been causing a lot of confusion in my life. I know that, God willing, I will be at UBC Vancouver in the fall, but I don't know what I will be studying. For the past couple of years I had been planning on doing a degree in Applied Mathematics and then become a highschool teacher. But then recently - for a few reasons - I have been pulled or encouraged into other departments. I have been contemplating doing a degree in Anthropology with a minor in Asian Language and Culture, primarily to learn some mandarin. But how do I decide? I can think of a huge list of pro's and con's for each side. This is exactly why I have applied to so many uni's over the past five years and gone to none. It is not that I can't think of anything to study, it's that I want to study everything and the pressure to choose and commit to that one topic for so many years is too much because I start thinking about all the other things that I won't be studying!

Conundrum.

Well the virtue of this week is acceptance. And I leave you with this thought (compliments of Linda Kavelin Popov) 'What test in my life have I accepted with grace and humour?'