Vivekananda Mailing List-1/10/03

[Guest guest]

Duty is seldom sweet. It is only when love greases its wheels that it

runs smoothly; it is a continuous friction otherwise. How else could

parents do their duties to their children, husbands to their wives, and

vice versa? Do we not meet with cases of friction every day in our

lives? Duty is sweet only through love, and love shines in freedom

alone. Yet is it freedom to be a slave to the senses, to anger, to

jealousies and a hundred other petty things that must occur every day

in human life? In all these little roughnesses that we meet with in

life, the highest expression of freedom is to forbear. Women, slaves to

their own irritable, jealous tempers, are apt to blame their husbands,

and assert their own " freedom " , as they think, not knowing that thereby

they only prove that they are slaves. So it is with husbands who

eternally find fault with their wives.