CONTENTMENT

Have you ever, at any one time, had the feeling that life is bad, real bad,
and you wish you were in another situation?
You find life make things difficult for you, work sucks,everything seems to go wrong...

Read the following story... it may change your views about life:

After a conversation with one of my friends, he told me despite taking 2
jobs, he brings back barely above 1K per month, he is happy as he is. I
wonder how he can be as happy as he is considering he has to skimp his life
with the low pay to support a pair of old parents, in-laws, a wife, 2
daughters and the many bills of a household. He explained that it was
through one incident that he saw in India...that happened a few years ago
when he was really feeling low and touring India after a major setback.

He said that right in front of his very eyes he saw an Indian mother chop
off her child's right hand with a chopper. The helplessness in the mother's
eyes, the scream of pain from the innocent 4-year-old child haunted him
until today. You may ask why did the mother do so; had the child been
naughty, had the child's hand been infected?? No, it was done for two
simple words- TO BEG!

The desperate mother deliberately caused the child to be handicapped so
that the child could go out to the streets to beg. Taken aback by the
scene, he dropped a piece of bread he was eating halfway. And almost
instantly, a flock of 5 or 6 children swamped towards this small piece of
bread, which was covered with sand, robbing bits from one another. The
natural reaction of hunger. Stricken by the happenings, he instructed his
guide to drive him to the nearest bakery. He arrived at two bakeries and
bought every single loaf of bread he found in the bakeries. The owner was
umbfounded but willingly sold everything. He spent less than $100 to obtain
about 400 loaves of bread (this is less than $0.25 per loaf) and spent
another $100 to get daily necessities. Off he went in the truck full of
bread into the streets. As he distributed the bread and necessities to the
children (mostly handicapped) and a few adults, he received cheers and bows
from these unfortunates. For the first time in his life he wondered how
people could give up their dignity for a loaf of bread which cost less than
$0.25.

He began to tell himself how fortunate he is. How fortunate he is to be
able to have a complete body, have a job, have a family, have the chance to
complain what food is nice and what isn't nice, have the chance to be
clothed, have the many things that these people in front of him are
deprived of...Now I begin to think and feel it, too! Was my life really
that bad? Perhaps... no, I should not feel bad at all... What about you?
Maybe the next time you think you are, think about the child who lost one
hand to beg on the streets.

"Contentment is not the fulfillment of what you want, it is the realization
of how much you already have."
When the door of happiness closes, another opens, but often times we look
so long at the closed door that we don't see the one,which has been opened
for us.

It's true that we don't know what we've got until we lose it, but it's also
true that we don't know what we've been missing until it arrives. The
happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just
make the most of everything that comes along their way. The brightest
future will always be based on a forgotten past, you can't go on well in
life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches.