be the change i want to see in the world

I am signed up for ten month joy class. it’s taught by a local meditation teacher, and class starts next week. somehow, oprah got wind of it, but you know if joy was the next trendy fad, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing
http://www.oprah.com/spiritself/omag/ss_omag_200801_joy.jhtml

_{there’s homework, too!}

found this….

If the world were a village of 1,000 people, it would include:

· 584 Asians
· 124 Africans
· 95 East and West Europeans
· 84 Latin Americans
· 55 Soviets (including for the moment Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and other national groups)
· 52 North Americans
· 6 Australians and New Zealanders

The people of the village have considerable difficulty in communicating:

· 165 people speak Mandarin
· 86 English
· 83 Hindi/Urdu
· 64 Spanish
· 58 Russian
· 37 Arabic
That list accounts for the mother tongues of only half the villagers. The other half speak (in descending order of frequency) Bengali, Portuguese, Indonesian, Japanese, German, French and 200 other languages.

In this village of 1,000 there are:

· 329 Christians (among them 187 Catholics, 84 Protestants, 31 Orthodox)
· 178 Muslims
· 167 “non-religious”
· l32 Hindus
· 60 Buddhists
· 45 atheists
· 3 Jews
· 86 all other religions

In the village of 1,000 people, there are:

· 5 soldiers
· 7 teachers
· 1 doctor
· 3 refugees driven from home by war or drought

Education
700 would be illiterate
10 would have a college education

Health and Life
500 would be malnourished
330 would not have clean, safe drinking water
10 would be near death; and 10 would be near birth
800 would live in substandard housing
890 would be heterosexual
110 would be homosexual
480 would be Male
520 would be female

bad day….got a ticket for going over what i thought was space enough, but was a double yellow, and the cottage i wanted got rented to someone else.
here’s an opportunity to react with compassion (for myself and the officer and the landlord) and faith (that there is a plan for me, and all things will turn out ok).
why is tis so hard to do?

I considered adding the goal Have a totally different life by this time next year, but don’t really want a totally different life. I do want to make a significant change in my general state of contentment and happiness.
I like my life, but recently I have been dissatisfied…why does it feel like it’s not enough?

• not being in a long-term relationship. i do want to get married one day. at this rate, I’m beginning to wonder if, not when.
• the fact that i wanted kids, but might not have my own.
• not owning a house, and feeling like this will never happen
• unhappy about my athletic performance and abilities, comparing myself to what I think I should be able to do. why am i so rough on myself?
• not keeping up with the jones’es of outside, trail runner and national geographic traveler magazines. like my life should be one big outside adventure, and it’s not.
• and the vague sense that i might not have yet found my real purpose on this earth, there is something i ought to be doing, but I’m not listening.

Today I took some quizzes from a website I found (?Penn) on happiness research. One of the quizzes was about symptoms of depression in the last two weeks. I came up “moderately depressed”, which was an eye-opener. I have been in a pretty big funk for the last month. Granted, my relationship ended, and we have not done a very good job of cutting ties, so it’s dying a slow death. Not the best way.

My state of mind these days is not unlike the state of the world right now. Unhappy! War, fear, confusion, inaction, poor health.

So tonight, on my run, I made a note of the date and the time (7:44) and made a vow that by this time next year, my life would be different, and that I would be truly content with my place in it. Ready….go!