Competition

This is my super cute 8 year old host cousin Nima. Nima and I played cards a lot in addition to dancing. I taught her how to play spit with New York playing cards, which have beautiful photos of the skyline on them. Kind of a bummer to pull out because they make me feel far away from familiar things, but she liked them because they're new and smooth.

While playing, she started cheating and I got really annoyed because I am competitive and beating an eight year old at spit matters to me. Then I took a deep breath and tried to apply the Buddhist outlook I have been learning to my card game.

It's strange to think that ultimately, competitiveness and ambition and striving don't really matter. I watched BBC news with amala and pala tonight and saw for the first time footage of the uprisings in Lybia. Rebels are fighting for a cause they truly believe in, and are willing to die for it, and pala and I are talking about how if people realized their attachment to material things they wouldn't need to live in this world to be happy. I like Buddhist ideas, but it's so hard to reconcile them with the outside world and how other people often think.

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