Embracing Life's Luxurious Problems: A Lesson in Gratitude

It was the middle of June in Delhi, with the mercury touching a scorching 48 degrees at noon, when one of my colleagues raised concerns about the unbearable chill in our seating area in our office. Yes, you read it right – the unbearable chills. The temperature in the centralized air conditioning in our floor area was around 22 degrees with maximum fan speed. The poor colleague of ours who sits just beneath the AC duct had to suffer from the continuous cold breezes. After hearing her concerns, I adjusted the temperature and fan speed to make it more comfortable (after I could locate the remote control, which is mostly missing when needed most). Immediately, I popped an open question to all sitting in that common area – How does it feel to have such a lavish problem in life? Everyone smiled at the question with a few bursting into laughter, but there was a moment of realization and gratitude in the air we all could sense. All of us, within ourselves, were thanking our fortunes and destiny that we had the discomfort of low AC temperature at a time when masses were struggling in the summer heat of June.

The delivery boys, street vendors, rickshaw pullers, daily wage labourers, and other millions of hardworking workers' major problem in a day is not the unbearable heat. It is the concern and fear that they would be able to meet the day's wage/delivery target. Would there be enough at the end of the day to feed the family, pay the school fees, or increase that little corpus to arrange for the daughter’s marriage? The struggles and pains the majority of the population across the country go through are further spiked by the extremes of weather these days. The traffic jams that irritate us on an almost daily basis while we sit and listen to the radio in our comfortable, AC cars not only greet the masses with similar delays but also add to their on-time delivery pressure. Most of us empathize with the struggles of the masses but could do little to support or maybe lighten their pressures. However, there are always a few extra steps or actions that could make some difference. Simple actions such as offering water to the delivery agents (as mentioned by food/groceries apps), giving space to bikers and street vendors on the road, keeping cool if a delivery guy on the bike accidentally scratches the side mirror of your car, or asking the security guard to sit in the closed cabin with a fan/cooler rather than standing all day during the peak of heat could bring in some sort of unnoticeable relief to the daily hustles of many people.

The planet belongs to all, but the distribution of resources is substantially uneven. Even the adversities of climate are not distributed uniformly. The people with the best of resources often face the least adversities and vice-versa. The small acts of kindness may not reduce the gap but could condense the struggles of facing these adversities.

So next time, if you are struggling with the lunch menus for your kid’s birthday party or are confused about the colors of your next car or hopping from one outlet to another to get that best anniversary present, don’t get frustrated or curse the struggle, rather embrace it. Be grateful to your destiny for giving you such amazing problems to be concerned about. Remember this, your medium-sized veg extravaganza pizza is equivalent to the festival budget of a family a few meters away from your house.

In recognizing our "lavish problems," we can cultivate a deeper sense of gratitude and compassion. Life’s comforts are blessings that many can only dream of. Let’s honor those blessings by extending kindness and understanding to those whose daily struggles remind us of our own fortune.

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