Notice How Hard Everyone Around You Is Trying

Take some time to notice how hard everyone around you is trying.

In Iran, it is customary to acknowledge when others are working by saying, Khaste na bashi — "May you not be weary."

In America, we tend to respond to other people's labor by comparing their efforts to our own: "That person is lazy" or "Look at that sad sack slaving her life away."

We don't realize that by comparing instead of appreciating, we cheapen the value of our own efforts by training ourselves to perceive the world as uncooperative and unrewarding.

This is why most of us find work so disagreeable, for in ceasing to thank others, we come to find our own tasks thankless.

So today, walk where people are working and silently acknowledge their efforts.

And not just people scrubbing floors or lifting heavy things, but all the men and women taking care of themselves by running errands or just sitting together with those they love.

Even when people’s actions strike you as misguided, notice the struggle for happiness beneath what they are doing.

Notice trees bending their branches toward the sun and bricks resisting the entropy of time.

The whole world is flowering around you, and as you learn to see it with eyes of praise, you will see your own life flowering too.

From my book, The Magpie Art, 173

Max Liebermann, "Workers in the Beet Field" (1876)