What an effort

Friday 15th January

The gratitude factor is vital for growth. Any growth is a matter of give and take – taking what’s on offer and giving back in terms of appreciation and gratitude. If it doesn’t come freely and willingly and it’s all too much of an effort then our intentions are failing - we aren’t being effective, we’re not getting satisfaction or benefits. Any benefits we do hope to get (from our ‘acts of goodness’) might seem to have strings attached; instead of a generosity of spirit we’d only see grudging behaviour and our becoming resentful, that what we’d rationed out more than we were getting back. Trying to do the right thing is always a mix of the success and glow of acting for the greater good and the defeating blow of resentment. Imagine becoming a vegan, making the effort to give things up and yet it always being an ‘effort’. We’d eventually feel like giving up and going back to easier ways.
That’s the critical factor in experimenting – is it worth going on to reach the time when it isn’t all such an effort? Starting up a new lifestyle habit, what seems to be a better way, will it fail or succeed? I suppose all people ask this. And ask if expending energy is being scuppered by others’ inaction, as if we’re doing the right thing and ‘making the effort’ (taking the lead) while others should be doing things too, to lighten the load. To break this cycle, to release a more exciting and effective level of energy into what we intend to do, we need to ratchet things up to a new level. It’s all in the perception … for instance, instead of accepting ‘food’, as everyone else does, in terms of self benefit alone, it becomes a symbol of protest – that’s much of what ‘veganism’ is doing. It takes our relationship with our world up to a gentler, more intelligent level. As a vegan we begin to see the link between self development and self discipline. Being vegan is discovering our own potential, especially where ‘making the effort’ is concerned .
Scourging ourselves and doing our duty is not the same sort of ‘effort’ because it’s an unnecessarily unhappy route to take. With a little imagination (whisperings from the devas!!) we can adapt the give and take principle to our creative effort.