Rock and Roll Never Forgets

True love grows by sacrifice and the more thoroughly the soul rejects natural satisfaction the stronger and more detached its tenderness becomes. – Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

If somebody is kind to us ninety-nine times and then does one hurtful thing, we are likely to forget the ninety-nine good things and remember the one bad thing. We can watch it happen in ourselves – no matter how absurd we know it is – when our parents or partner or children fail us and we blow a fuse. When we get angry, we suffer a curious, temporary attack of amnesia. For the time being, we just cannot remember that week when she nursed us when we came down with the flu. We forget the time he entertained us cheerfully when we were depressed and irritable. We don’t see the hundreds and hundreds of white flags charting the course of good relations down the years. We see only this last crimson flag waving menacingly in our face.

This is not to say that we should close our eyes when someone is unkind to us. But if we can turn our attention away from that one act of unkindness and turn it to all the kindnesses we have received down the years, the incident will fall into its proper place. We will probably say to ourselves, “This hostility is so petty! I shouldn’t even have let it come up.”

The Thought for the Day is today's entry from Eknath Easwaran's Words to Live By.
(Copyright 1999 and 2005 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.)