Everything is a Treat

Being able to spend time with the people you love to spend time with is a gift. It is so easy to take the people we meet and those who stay in our lives for granted. And because we take them for granted, we nitpick at their flaws or are perpetually dissatisfied with how they fail us in some ways. When we start to see every small pleasure in our lives as a treat rather than as a given, our day-to-day, even in the routine, becomes a treasure chest of joy.

I am trying to achieve balance. I want to enjoy the sensual pleasures this world gives me but I also want to renounce certain pleasures that are normalized. Renunciation refines my spiritual life because it shifts my attention away from human cravings and toward a mysterious essence that is inside me. It’s a discipline. The deeper experience of being that comes from shifting my gaze from the world gives me the kind of joy that the external world can’t give and this joy might be what makes a dose of discipline pleasurable.

Renouncing means a change in perspective though. It means letting go of the ways of thinking that the rest of the world adopts. It means being okay with foregoing what others might think strange and incomprehensible to go without. There is true liberation in standing firm in our differences from others. Maybe it’s the world that is strange in its normalcy.