Car versus Karma

Today I learned something new about cars and the people who drive them.

I just discovered my best friend (let's call her X) now owns an Audi convertible, same car as my other friend (let's call her Y). I always thought of my friend Y as a person who was wildly materialistic and greedy for confirmation of her success. I know my best friend X to be a beautiful soul, whose goal in life is to give and receive love, to live well but with great kindness to others and to share her happiness and success.

I was shocked to learn that both these women now own the same car. What was I missing?

In talking to X about her new car, I understood she had longed for a car like that since she could point at pictures in a book. She told me the car made her feel beautiful, secure and serene. If I were to question Y she would probably tell me the same thing word for word.

Why the huge difference in their personalities then, or more importantly, why my own prejudice against Y?

I think it's this: X is loving, quick to forgive, honest and full of positivity and laughter. She laughs at her own need to drive such a car, she knows it's a dream that she's finally been able to fulfill and gives thanks to God every night for her good fortune at being healthy enough to work and to be able to afford such wonderful luxuries.

Y on the other hand is still unhappy. I know she feels lonely at not being able to share this "obvious" success story with her family (from whom she is estranged - they lack ambition and prefer reading to mingling at cocktail parties). I know when she parks the car in her drive at night she dreads walking up the path to her rambling house where marital uneasiness and discontentment are waiting.

I don't envy her. I'd like to take her home and treat her to a night of Reiki and Reflexology, Angel cards and Tarot readings. I know she'd laugh and clap her hands to feel so close to her centre for once in a very long time.

It would be a pleasure to show Y the joys of living a more positive life of giving and sharing and living in the moment. But sadly young souls like Y often scorn any notion of self-love and enlightenment. Instead of inspiring curiosity and personal interest, such words conjure images of glamorless hippies in baggy thai-dye clothing and hairy legs with crystal Ankhs around their pasty vegetarian necks.

I never talk to Y any more about the lighter side of life. She's simply not interested. As someone a little more enlightened with a little more knowledge, ought it not to be my duty to instruct her in the ways of more elevated aspirations? Yet for all my healings and holistic therapies I realise my distance from Y is little more than my soul's proud and ugly prejudice against her for her spiritual immaturity. Why else would I be so quick to criticise her choice of transport and yet so willing to indulge X in her very same dream?