Life is Difficult

The past few days I've been pretty frustrated with our job choices and the options available to us. But I just realized that I've forgotten one of the major facts of life that I know to be true. Life is difficult. I learned a lot about this fact of life from the famous book The Road Less Traveled, required reading for all, young and old. The concept I'm referring to can be read here (hit the right arrow button twice). Basically, the deal is that life is difficult and that once you accept this fact, by that very action, you can transcend the situation and therefore, life is no longer so difficult.

I have forgotten this in the past few days. Everything is back in perspective again.

Another great point of the book is Peck's definition of love. Everyone has their own ideas of love and what it is, but I must say that I have adopted Peck's definition into the way I think about love. Basically he says that to love someone, you have to enhance the spiritual growth of that person, i.e., you can not love your golf clubs or garden because you can not enhance the spiritual growth of those items. He goes on to give examples of over-protective parents not loving their children if they, for example, drive their child to school everyday rather than allow him/her to ride the bus with the rest of the kids. The child will miss out on important everyday interactions, friendships, and yes, hardships that will cause that child to grow and learn in ways not offered in the safe haven of Mom's car. This is just an example, please don't take this in a way, that if you drive your kids to school, that I'm saying you're not loving your child. I have personally been driven to school, walked to school, driven myself, and have taken the bus throughout my elementary/middle/high school career.

I have personally seen children that were robbed of every normal interaction with their peers under the pretext of "protecting" them. That is not loving your child. Those kids absolutely could not interact normally in different social interactions, simply because they had zero experience in doing this. Their spiritual growth had been stunted...

Anyway, I don't hear a lot of people talking about the definition of love and I actually think about it a lot. What's your definition of 'love'?