Is it ok to be happy when others are suffering?

Before I became a coach and mentor for spiritual leaders, I spent the better part of a decade working as a landscape designer. While it sounds glamorous, I wasn’t just sitting in the office drawing pretty pictures.

I spend countless days in the blazing heat, driving winds and bitter cold managing the properties in my portfolio and helping the landscape crews install my designs. Digging a six-foot-deep hole to locate an irrigation leak, wading through poison ivy at the back of a property, sweating my ass off.

It was physical, back-breaking, arduous work.

A part of me loved it. I’ve always felt a deep satisfaction after pushing my body to its limits, whether training for the cross-country running team in high school, working on my family’s farm or unloading hundreds of flats of flowers from the delivery truck at work each Monday.

The stretch in your muscles, the rapid beating of your heart, testing out your lung capacity. Bring it!

I also witnessed a lot of suffering while in that profession. I was indoctrinated to believe only extremely hard work was valuable, anything else was laziness. The owners of the company actively cultivated that mindset in all their employees — to their benefit.