To enjoy the greatest pleasure in life, we need to embrace the half of the glass that's full and the half that's empty.
What is life's greatest pleasure? It's not an easy question. Close your eyes a minute and think about it before you read any further.
What did you come up with?
We know the answer is not cars, vacations or golf, although some of us may have a pretty good argument. Love gets a high rating by many while others vote for success, children and power. (That's more on target, but not the ultimate!)
How about knowing and having a relationship with the Creator of the Universe?
Even an atheist would agree that if there really is a God, then to know Him would be the ultimate pleasure -- greater than Maui, family and all the success in the world.
In the great medieval classic entitled Duties of the Heart, the author Rabbi Bachya Ibn Paquda discusses four steps to falling in love with God.
The four steps are:
This article discusses the first step. Underlying the application of his method is a fundamental principle of Judaism: If you want to grow spiritually, you must grow emotionally and psychologically. Indeed, it's impossible to become spiritually mature without becoming emotionally mature at the same time.
To begin, says Ibn Paquda, you cannot fall in love with God until you fall in love with life first. It is impossible to love God if you do not deeply and passionately appreciate all that is good about being alive. Unfortunately, to become a master of appreciation is not easy to achieve.
Do you appreciate your hand? Most of us say we do, but we really don't. There is a crucial difference between having an "intellectual appreciation" of your hand, as opposed to having an "emotional appreciation" of your hand.
When we emotionally appreciate something, we experience a "pleasure burst." We've all had pleasure bursts. When something good happens, or we see a gorgeous sunset, we appreciate the beauty and goodness of the moment. But most of the time we are not experiencing pleasure bursts at all, which means we are not actively appreciating how great it is to be alive.
Which should give you a bigger pleasure burst -- a bowl of ice cream or your hand?
Obviously, your hand is worth much more than a bowl of Ben and Jerry's, but we don't feel it, because we are not able to obtain a real emotional appreciation of our hands. Why don't we have a deeper and more consistent emotional appreciation of life and all that is good about it? Because we find it hard to accept that life isn't perfect.
A major reason why we are not in love with life is because we use much of our time and energy fighting and obsessing about what's not right with ourselves and others. We simply cannot tolerate the apparent imperfections. It's not that we're all perfectionists, rather it's that we have acquired a destructive way of seeing the world, which results in making us miserable.
A classic illustration of this is the story of the person who goes on a picnic and is having a great time with friends and family on a cloudless summer day until he discovers there is no mustard for his hotdog. The entire day is shot! Suddenly, not only is his hotdog inedible, but the whole day is ruined.
Sound familiar? This is how most of us live our lives day in and day out. We cannot tolerate imperfection and when we discover something that is wrong or missing in our lives, we obsess over it. Sometimes we are able to change what's wrong, but if we can't we often wipe ourselves out with frustration, anger or resentment.
My wife can't seem to manage money in a responsible fashion. My husband never picks the right gift for special occasions. I am always struggling with food, insufficient income or lack of self-confidence. I'm not married. I married the wrong the person. I don't have kids. My kids drive me crazy with their constant demands. We all have imperfection in our lives!