“Why Love is Better Than Desire”

I have a friend who wants to start a foundation to help people in third world countries. But he also wants his wife and kids to work with him on his project… but they are not interested.

In fact, his wife and kids are not interested at all… and he gets upset with them because they can’t understand why their father wants to travel to far off countries and help people they don’t even know. And thus he stops working on his foundation because he wants with all his heart that everyone in the family to be interested in working on his dream. So nothing gets done and people around the world who could be helped by his great love keep suffering.

There is no way we can covertly influence people to have them do what we want them to do. Thus we become stuck and feel down and nothing happens. Everyone has their own destiny, even our kids, they come from Great Spirit as Kahlil Gibran said… not from us… they belong to the Creator. And we all have free will to choose whatever they want to do. Our spouse and kids have different likes and dislikes and they have a different purpose to be fulfilled. Everyone of us came to this earth to fulfill a purpose. And that purpose many times has no ties to what other people are doing. We have our own process that needs to unfold according to the great plan.

So having a great desire to have our wife and kids participate in something only holds us back from ever achieving our goal. And it’s our goal, not their goal, and as Buddha said desires lead to suffering. And so we suffer because we want this, or want that, or want things to be different from the way they are. And when have such desires we are not living in the here-and-now. We are living in a place of negative future thinking… and because of that our now becomes compromised.

The best thing to do is to love everyone. And maybe someday, what we are doing might inspire them to join our vision. But love them no matter what… so they will thrive and follow their own path.

Thus the best thing to do is to march forward with our own great plan and if someone loves what we are doing and wants to join… GREAT. If not, then let’s get going and march forward.

We all march to the beat of a different drummer.

Plus we are the only one that can hear that drum beating in the distance.

Are you marching to the beat of your drum?

Or have desires like my friend?

Many Blessings to Everyone!

Dr. Paul Haider