There are a great many spiritual lessons that one is supposed to learn by going without, by fasting. When the book of Leviticus refers to the required fast on the Day of Atonement that I ended only a couple of hours ago or so as I write this, the expression used is afflicting one’s soul. In my listening to church messages and in my reading on this festival and more generally on the subject of fasting I have seen a great many good lessons about reconciliation and the importance of recognizing our own frailty and dependence on God for what we need to survive, the sort of food and water that can often be taken for granted by those who can eat whatever they want whenever they want. As I belong to a religious tradition that regularly engages in fasting, but not nearly as much as the accounts I read of past ages where some people fasted multiple times a week, I often wonder whether the experience of fasting can help aid or hinder the learning of lessons.

For myself, I do not find fasting to be a particularly painful or unpleasant task. At least in the past decade or more, I have been able to fast without feeling a great deal of discomfort, except for thirst, and even then, the fact that it was a cool and rainy day kept me from feeling too thirsty today while I fasted. I do not find that I am short of temper when I fast, or that I am more irritable than I usually am, and often I find that other people are not able to tell the difference between my fasting and my normal way of being. One time I fasted for personal reasons on a work day and found that other people could not tell the difference between the way I acted while fasting and normally, except perhaps that they could not see me eating some kind of soup and salad/sandwich. Perhaps they simply thought I had different break hours that day and just shrugged it off, since they noticed nothing amiss.

My concern can be boiled down to a set of related questions: Is it a bad thing that fasting comes so easily to me? Are there lessons that I miss because fasting is not a struggle to me? Does my own experience with fasting over the course of my life, where I have generally been able to fast without a great deal of discomfort and suffering, make me less sympathetic to those who struggle with it? Indeed, there is a whole host of concerns that can follow when one does things easily, and that is the possibility that one may take them for granted. I certainly suffer enough in other areas of life that my ease of fasting need not lead me to think of life as a pleasure cruise that one goes along without feeling any sort of pain or sorrow or discomfort. Nonetheless, I am sensitive not only to things that come with difficulty for me but also those things that come easily, in that I hope I do not lack something that could be learned from experiences that are more of a challenge.

Much depends, I think, on the attitude that one has to those areas of life that come easily. While it is a bad thing to take something for granted because it comes without a high degree of challenge or difficulty, it is a good thing to be grateful that one does not struggle in all things. One can be compassionate to those who suffer even in areas where one does not suffer for oneself, and knowing that one has not necessarily done anything to deserve one’s good fortune in things coming easily can make one more helpful to those who struggle to a greater degree. It is not so much our circumstances that matter so much, or the situation itself, but rather how it is that we think and feel about it and what attitude we have about it. We all struggle enough in different ways that we can learn how to struggle well, how to develop habits of determination and overcoming our difficulties and maintaining a positive attitude in the midst of them. On the other hand, when we find an aspect of life that comes easily for us, having the right attitude can allow us to develop habits of gratitude as well as of compassion for others. Often, life’s not what about what we have, but what we make of it.