Life’s Seven Challenges

The seven challenges to being a good human being are: Humility, Patience, Acceptance of Fate, Surrender, Simplicity, Detachment and Harmony with Nature.

The theme underlying all of the challenges is the basic struggle to be a well-balanced, good-hearted person. There is a story about two monks who are walking along when one asks the other about his goals in life. The one monk replies, “I’d like to be a saint. Why? What are your goals?” The other monk says, “I just want to be a good human being.” The first monk responds, “You are very ambitious.”

Humility: Whatever qualities or attributes we possess were given to us. They were not our doing. We didn’t create our intelligence, competence with languages, artistic skills, or ability to deal well with people. These are, quite literally, gifts. As we develop spiritually, we increase our ability to help or heal others. We can become better vehicles for healing or helping, but we are not the originators of that energy. Part of the purpose of spiritual development is to help others, but that is not a way or an excuse for making ourselves more important or powerful.

Patience: Spiritual development takes a very long time and is a slow and painstaking process. It is work that does not end. There is no ‘getting there.’ There is only more insight, and the reward is more work.  Impatience merely hampers our progress. It is as inappropriate as standing in your garden screaming at a seedling to grow faster, to hurry up and bloom.

Blooms once a year

Acceptance of Fate: We can’t control reality. But we can control the way we deal with whatever happens. We can feel defeated by a particular event and wail at the heavens, or we can choose to view the event as a challenge, a test of our ability to maintain faith no matter what the circumstance. But an understanding that some things are beyond our control is a wisdom and can simply be accepted as gracefully as possible.

Impartial Observer

Detachment: When we learn to accept fate and surrender our egos and intellects we learn to have more detachment in our everyday lives. This does not mean that we don’t care about things, people, or our responsibilities. We still experience strong emotions and can be deeply involved in many areas. But we learn to maintain a certain perspective, to see things in context rather than merely from the narrow viewpoint of our own egos. When someone infuriates us, we still feel the rage. In addition, however, we learn to have the discipline to also view the situation impersonally, as if we were an impartial observer.