Sacrifice

“Sacrifice,” the Captain said. “You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. [. . .] You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. [. . .] Sometimes when you sacrifices something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else."

--an excerpt from Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven
[emphasis mine]


I never thought about it like that... life, a gift given from one person to another, sacrifice for the one, gain for the other. But like water flowing through one person and filling up another, the life given is not lost, merely passed on.

That's hard for me. So often sacrifice DOES seem like loss when you're the one giving. But when I look at it like this, "you're not really losing it. You're just passing it on to someone else," sacrifice seems a lot less gut wrenching and much more beautiful.

Ariya