The day I stopped believing in envy.

When I was a young man, viagra sales seek just out of college, cialis sales I was very jealous of another man my age.

He was handsome. He had a good job. He was married to a very beautiful woman who was pregnant with their first child. They were even building a new home together.

He had the perfect life.

Then one day, he got a call from her office. A coworker had found her slumped over in her chair unbreathing. They were unable to revive her and the child was gone. In the space of a few seconds, this young man – whom I had spent countless hours envying – had lost his entire family.

He went from having the perfect life to having no life at all.

The astonishing ferocity of his loss taught me that envy is a foolish passtime, that none of us have so much that we are beyond losing it, and that my only hope for a fulfilling life was to learn to replace covetousness with contentment.

And while my gain can never be the equal of that his loss, I am still thankful for the lesson nearly two decades later. Wherever he is now, I hope he is as content with his life as I am with mine.

3 comments December 14th, 2006