Change is Good

     I received in my e-mail the last installment of the seven deadly sins columns in Paulo Coelho’s Warrior of Light blog which is about sloth. The column includes different takes on the subject but I would like to share this particular old fable. It made me think about what I’ve been doing for the past year, which was mostly nothing.

An old fable passed on orally: As soon as he died, Juan found himself in a very beautiful place, surrounded by the comfort and beauty that he had dreamt of. A person dressed in white came up: ‘you have the right to whatever you want: any food, pleasure, fun”, he said.
Delighted, Juan did everything he had dreamt of during life. After many years of pleasures, he looked for the person in white:
“I’ve already done everything I wanted to”, he said. “Now I need some work, to feel useful”.
“I’m very sorry”, said the person in white, “but this is the only thing that I cannot get for you. Here there is no work”.
“To spend eternity dying of tedium? I would prefer a thousand times to be in hell!”
The person in white came up, and said in a low voice:
“Where do you think you are?”

     If I wasn’t doing “nothing” this long, then I wouldn’t understand this old fable at all. Before my idea of heaven doesn’t include work, but having to bum around for so long and experience occasional depression for being so useless made me realize that leisure and comfort doesn’t really lead to happiness. Although too much hard work doesn’t either, we must work and share what we have to the world without sacrificing time for ourselves and for the people we love.

     Maybe we should be thankful for every hardships and changes we encounter because every time we struggle through it we learn things we never knew. Change enables us to discover what we can do and it gives us the opportunity not to be too much comfortable with our lives. It made us realize that everything is temporary and life is still a mystery.  Let us thank God for the mysteries of the universe for unlike Juan in the story, there are still infinite of things we could do and learn. That’s how we find out that dreams that are so hard to reach are blessings and life being beyond our understanding is actually a good thing.