Here’s a painful fact of life:
Life WILL suck sometimes – and the sooner you embrace that fact, the easier it will be.
There will be career dissatisfactions and financial troubles, you will have relationship bumps, you will not have enough time for what you truly love, you will experience illness and death.
There will be plagues and high profile lockdown breakers, you will meet small minded, hurtful yet powerful people, life WILL be unfair.
It’s not an if … it’s a when.
Like the ancient Stoics’ metaphor of a dog tied to a cart, sometimes the cart is going to roll. We, the dog, can make the journey as hard or as easy as we like.
Fighting reality – what is – is never fruitful: it’s one of the biggest lessons anyone can learn.
Attempting to fight reality meant I got so frustrated I couldn’t make life happen my way; which meant I would, at some stage, give up in disgust.
Giving up then meant I was freed to focus on what I did have control over, with energy; and then sleep well in the night.
So give up.
Giving up does NOT mean you give up all preferences and action and become a beige blob of “I don’t care, it is what it is, it’s meant to be”. (Although there is a lot of power in those attitudes, at the right time.)
Of course you have a preference!! Passion, properly grounded, is life.
But acceptance showed me that it wasn’t life that made me happy, it was me who had the power to bring happiness to life – no matter what is happening, no matter how unfair or outrageous the world seemed to be.
In acceptance there is also resiliency, the ability to endure and not let the cares of the world grind you down, ultimately so you can keep going with what you know is right – because your peace of mind, even sanity, has nothing to do with the outside world.
It means your heart is wide open too, not fixed on one idea, one belief. You can learn, you can understand, you can have empathy and compassion. You’re not stuck, you’re growing.
Life is trying to wake us up to this fact all the time, at least that’s what I assume when I find myself struggling. It’s my wake up call to remember, to step back into ease, peace and clarity and see what I can do, see what the moment requires.
So if you’re angry and frustrated and upset, hopefully you might remember this. This is life. Stop fighting and take a step back. Feed love, not hate. You never need to struggle.
Go well!
Arjuna
PS. I’m doing more writing these days. Who knows how long it will last, but if you fancy reading some more, head over to me on Facebook: https://business.facebook.com/MrArjunaIshaya/
PPS.
I just edited a little video snippet on Surrender over on Youtube.
What is Surrender?
If you’ve been reading me for a while you won’t be surprised to know that I think it has two sides, and both are important to honour: https://youtu.be/UBYoPDn7HYs