When you're having a bad day, you may have thoughts that just make you angry with everything and everybody in the world. You're irritated while standing in line at Starbucks because the barista is taking too long. You're upset when your shoes don't fit right and give you a blister. You're angry when a professor makes you read twenty-page chapters in a book you'll probably never use again. It seems like nothing can go right and every moment is a major inconvenience in your life. You're probably thinking that you can be somewhere else or be doing something else. However, these are blessings compared to how other people around the world are living.
I don't think we realize sometimes how good we actually have it. I know our parents say this all the time, but it's true. There are other people in the world who simply do not even get the opportunity to have the things we find annoying in life.
When I went to Thailand, I saw children with no shoes on the way to school because their parents could not afford it. They don't have the chance to complain about having a blister, when they don't even have shoes. I once saw a child pass me, he was probably about seven years old, and I tried to tell him his backpack was open. Due to the language barrier he had a hard time understanding me, but it wasn't until several minutes later that his teacher told me that his backpack was broken and had been like that for months. How many bags do we have lying around and never even use?
We complain about not having anything to wear when we're standing in a pile of clothes on the ground and have even more clothes hanging in our closet. But, I saw children who have only two pairs of clothes, one being their school uniform. But despite all this, these children were the happiest people I've ever seen. They didn't need fancy toys or sports equipment to have fun. They were laughing and smiling while playing with a deflated soccer ball. Meanwhile there are kids in America who cry when not getting a toy they want in the store.
Moreover, these children were excited to just have the opportunity to be learning and proudly showed us their textbooks. We begrudge our professors for even making us buy textbooks. We have a wealth of knowledge literally at our fingertips and most of these children will not even get the chance to go to high school in order to help their family make a living.
Sometimes we need to step back from the materialistic culture we live in. We're caught in a system of consumerism and are so determined to have the best of the best that we forget to simply just be happy.
We need to be happy for the people in our lives. We need to re-evaluate and prioritize our relationships over objects. Everybody in Thailand, not just the children, were so friendly and positive. They always smiled and said "hello" to me, even though we didn't even speak the same language. They were so generous, giving us their food, even though they had an entire village to feed. Their infectious smiles just radiated a feeling of warmth and serenity.
If we go back to just being content for the simple conveniences we have in life like having shoes or having books to read, we'd be better off. We need to teach our children to be more appreciative and that starts with being more appreciative ourselves. We mold the next generation through our actions and it's our responsibility to change our attitude about the inconveniences in our life. Sometimes it's just important to sit back, relax, and just talk with our friends and family. You'll find that you may actually forget about the bothersome annoyances going on at the moment and may actually just smile.
