My Best Friend Made Me Read The Book Of Joy?!

One of my best friends made me read the Book Of Joy. And he’s still my best friend, so it wasn’t as terrible as the name suggests. or I just have no other friends. A bit of both.

 The Book Of Joy has three authors; the 13th Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Abrams. The Dalai Lama is a simple monk. Tutu is his best friend and a Christian, and Abrams is the founder of Idea Architects, a media company for visionaries like these two and Stephen Hawking. 

They talk about compassion. They talk about letting go of the bad and breathing in the good. Acknowledging other’s suffering so that you don’t feel alone in your own suffering. Gratitude. And experiencing the journey without a strong tie to the end.

If the goal is noble, your commitment to the goal should not be contingent on your ability to attain  it, and in pursuit of our goal, we must release our rigid assumptions about how we must achieve it

This passage was short, but it’s the one that called to me the most. No one person has total control over an outcome. Any number of things, from weather, to car crashes, to organizational miscommunication can change the outcome. Maybe you can do as you planned at another time, maybe carry it out in a different way, or scrap it altogether and do something else. But you keep going, and the important thing is what you learned on your journey. 

Gratitude 

 They talk about gratitude in a very Yo mama way; be grateful to have a house. If you don’t have a house, be grateful for the food, if you have no food, be grateful to see another day. As a homeless person, I didn’t really find this offensive, especially since the DL had to flee his palace because the Chinese were attacking it. Don’t ask me to explain it because everything I know about Tibet I learned from this book.

 It really did fill me with gratitude. Gratitude for the people who took care of my pets since I don’t have a place I can care for them in, gratitude for the friend that went through a hard time but made it out, gratitude for the brother that gave me this book in the first place.

It’s really an amazing book, life-changing for some. I did have an issue with the constant use of “he or she” instead of the more inclusive “they” and it pulled me out of a few passages.

Have you read The Book Of Joy? What were your favourite passages?