02 Jul Delayed Gratification

Summer has been hard. I was really wiped out yesterday from our recent international travel and  keeping the kids on schedule. Saying that it’s been “24/7” is a slight exaggeration, but not by much!

I was exhausted yesterday and didn’t go for my weekly 6 mile sun-rise run. I usually take my one day of rest religiously but had missed it for 2 weeks. Yesterday, I rested. (More on the importance of rest in another musing.)

By night-time, I considered going today. I decided if God would wake me up early enough for a sunrise run, I would go.

Well, this morning I did wake up early enough, and scrambled with my grudging body to look at the weather app to see if rain would save the day. No rain and so run it was!

Anyone who has achieved anything great is witness to the  path of delayed gratification through suffering to greatness.

This is not a new concept…it is almost as old as human civilization itself.

“Life is suffering.”–Buddha (The first of the four noble truths)

In 1972, Stanford’s Walter Mischel popularized deferred gratification in “The Marshmallow Experiment”. However in our increasingly “me -world” and in our race towards instant gratification where food and entertainment can be obtained with little or no effort, it is getting harder to practice and still harder to teach.

There are two concepts here: suffering and delayed gratification.

If we can accept that no matter what we do, we are going to suffer in life, then we are more likely to take  the hard gruesome path if it is the right one. We become more equipped to love. To love selflessly and unconditionally.

Only if we find (or journey towards finding) the joy in suffering, will our children even see that it is a possibility.

As parents, we have to embody suffering and delayed gratification because the world advertises the opposite. Our children need to see us tolerate hunger when waiting at a busy restaurant and boredom when stuck in traffic. They need to see us give up privileges and luxuries for another in our daily lives. We have to be that higher human that we want our children to become.

This is our family’s required summer reading this year. I first read this book about twenty years ago and everything I learned then still holds good. In fact, I have had to fall many times to understand the depths of this book better.

I must say, the ride back home with the windows down, a (relatively) cool summer breeze in my hair and a sense of accomplishment,  I was empowered to tackle what life might throw at me today. That, indeed, was gratification.