We are all so consumed by our lives.
Our thoughts dominate the narrative of our reality and we rarely intentionally take any down time to turn it off.
So we go about our days just as we have done so for years prior, allowing our pre-programmed mind machine to operate as it does.
Some of us are filled with excitement and enthusiasm while others predominantly feel anxious, stressed, envious and a handful of other negative emotions.
Some are able to approach whatever happens head on by pushing negativity to the sidelines and charging full steam ahead forward, minimally impacted. Others allow certain circumstances to negatively impact their state of mind, enabling them to feel that way for hours afterwards, potentially even for days or weeks, and ultimately turning into a part of their overall personality.
Which one are you? Or are you a hybrid of both?
How would it feel to become more like the first and less like the second?
This can be achieved by learning to transcend external events.
It is absolutely inevitable that people will annoy you and piss you off. That you will get stuck in traffic or get a flat tire. That the thing you’ve been looking forward to will get cancelled.
Life is filled with instances where you will simply be shit out of luck.
But that is one way that makes our existence special. If everything was always perfect and went exactly according to plan, we’d go CRAZY.
These annoyances and inconveniences are thrown at us so that we can learn from them and strengthen ourselves.
When we stop looking at them as individual catastrophes and start the practice of using them to our advantage, we can begin to see them as just another event occurring in our life that will come and go just like all the others before it.
Marcus Aurelius once said, “It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.”
Life is uncertain and impermanent.
By discarding misperceptions and judgements from our minds, we can live in a greater state of peace and composure that brings us more clarity and understanding.
Armed with this wisdom, we can mentally go beyond life’s trivialities and leave them in the rearview.
“A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. To have that. How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility.“ – Marcus Aurelius