When Prison Feels Like Heaven

In 2011, Somali pirates hijacked a South Korean cargo ship, the Samho Jewelry.

South Korean Navy commandos carried out a dramatic rescue operation known as Operation Dawn of Gulf of Aden. All 21 hostages were rescued, and five surviving pirates were brought to Korea, tried, and sent to prison.

Prison was supposed to be their punishment.

But then something strange happened.

For men who had come from a very different life in Somalia, a Korean prison offered things they had rarely known:

Three meals a day. A warm place to sleep. Safety. No worrying about where tomorrow’s food would come from.

Some of them learned Korean and even expressed a desire to stay in Korea after serving their sentences rather than return to Somalia.

Think about that for a moment.

A life designed as punishment for one person can feel almost like heaven to another.

So where exactly are heaven and hell?

Human beings have a funny habit.

We quickly stop seeing what we have, while becoming incredibly good at seeing what we don’t have.

A warm home? We barely notice it. Food on the table? We take it for granted. A healthy body? We don’t think much about it—until something goes wrong. Someone who loves us? Somehow, we get used to that too.

But the one thing we don’t have?

Oh, THAT we can see perfectly.

I sometimes think there are two diseases going around:

The Unhappy Disease and the Happy Disease.

When you have the Unhappy Disease, you can be sitting right in the middle of heaven and still find enough things wrong with it to build your own little hell.

The Happy Disease doesn’t mean you have everything you want.

It simply means you haven’t forgotten how to see what you already have.

Maybe enlightenment isn’t as mysterious as we make it sound.

Maybe sometimes it is simply this:

Finally noticing how much was already there.

So here is today’s little self-diagnosis:

Which one do you have—the Happy Disease or the Unhappy Disease?

And if you suspect you have a serious case of the Unhappy Disease...

Don’t worry.

We may have some medicine for that at River Flow Holistic.

No pills required.

Just move your body. Breathe. Slow down for a moment.

And perhaps you’ll begin to notice the heaven that was already around you.