THE DIGNITY OF RESTRAINT
It's always interesting to notice how words disappear from common us- age. We have them in our passive vocabulary, we know their meaning, but they tend to disappear from day-to-day conversation—which usu- ally means that they've disappeared from the way we shape our lives. Several years back I gave a dhamma talk in which I happened to men- tion the word dignity. After the talk, a woman in the audience who had emigrated from Russia came up to me and said that she had never heard Americans use the word dignity before. She had learned it when she studied English in Russia, but she had never heard people use it here. And it's good to think about why. Where and why did it disappear?
I think the reason is related to another word that tends to disappear from common usage, and that's restraint: foregoing certain pleasures, not because we have to, but because they go against our principles. The opportunity to indulge in those pleasures may be there, but we learn how to say no. This of course is related to another word we tend not to use