I love you Kathmandu, I really do.

If one has grown up in the relative convenience and comfort of any Western city, living here could potentially be difficult. Over the past year I have met several Westerners who have been driven to their wits end by "things not being like at home". I have also had some of those moments, although possibly less so due to having spent a fair bit of my life living a semi nomadic existence, much of it in Asia.

There are many sites that people will cite as the crowning jewel in Kathmandu, Swayambhu, Patan, the Boudhanath Stupa or the Himalayas towering behind Shivapuri on a clear day. These are all amazing places, and some of them have such spiritual value for me personally that I cannot put it into words.

Despite all this, what I actually love about Kathmandu is the people. Yes the same people who daily try to rip me off whenever I buy something or try to organise something.

Life here, and in the Himalayas in general, is fucking hard. In a different way it is also hard if you are a banker in London. Whatever we do, ultimately samsara has the nature of being self-prepetuating in the sense that we have to generate negative karma simply to survive. In some cases this means robbing people on the street, in some cases it means working for a corporation which is polluting the planet whilst using mercenaries to clear the pesky little brown people away from where you are mining.

So why do we do all this? We do this because we are habitually conditioned to follow our negative emotions.

Whether it's a policeman pushing you back at a protest, a fake sadhu wanting money, a banker refusing you a loan in a particularly annoying way, there is no objective reason to get angry with them. When someone acts like an asshole they are not choosing to be like this. Applying this to our own lives, we see how we are anything but happy when we are angry, jealous or greedy etc. Then seeing how we are unhappy at those times, we can instead take an attitude of empathetic patience thinking "I know why you are being such a prick" instead of looking for the most effective way to get one over on the person in question.