Making life easy and meaningful - I
Its been quite a while since I updated my blog. And after this rather long sabbatical, I thought I should put some of my earlier thoughts into action.
I always used to think that there should be an effective mechanism to document all our learning in life and share it with others. What better way than a blog! So, this series, titled "Making life easy and meaningful" will do just that, in an organized way.
Most of us experience a myriad of emotions in life - we have seen happiness, sadness, expectation, disappointment, elation and some of us even depression. At the end of all this, life just keeps going. So, we all kind of understand that life is like this and you'll get your fair share of everything. It's just not worth it to feel too happy when something works and too sad and depressed when it's otherwise.
At one level, we all understand this. But putting it into action is where it becomes difficult. I have learnt one thing - if something makes you so elated, then something else will make you too depressed as well. The missing piece is the control that I can wield.
It is not what happens to us that hurts us, it is our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Same goes for stuff that makes us happy. We make ourselves happy or sad, not what happens to us.
Since we can't control what happens to us, we need to wield the weapon we have - to control us; that means to train ourselves to think beyond happiness, sadness, elation, disappointment and depression; so that whatever happens, we carry on with life with great inner peace and strength.
It's not a destination to reach, but a mental state to achieve. Learning about the well defined ways and means for that empowers us to reach that state and be there. But how do we get and maintain that inner peace and strength? More in further posts.... Don't forget to drop in your comments....
I always used to think that there should be an effective mechanism to document all our learning in life and share it with others. What better way than a blog! So, this series, titled "Making life easy and meaningful" will do just that, in an organized way.
Most of us experience a myriad of emotions in life - we have seen happiness, sadness, expectation, disappointment, elation and some of us even depression. At the end of all this, life just keeps going. So, we all kind of understand that life is like this and you'll get your fair share of everything. It's just not worth it to feel too happy when something works and too sad and depressed when it's otherwise.
At one level, we all understand this. But putting it into action is where it becomes difficult. I have learnt one thing - if something makes you so elated, then something else will make you too depressed as well. The missing piece is the control that I can wield.
It is not what happens to us that hurts us, it is our response to what happens to us that hurts us. Same goes for stuff that makes us happy. We make ourselves happy or sad, not what happens to us.
Since we can't control what happens to us, we need to wield the weapon we have - to control us; that means to train ourselves to think beyond happiness, sadness, elation, disappointment and depression; so that whatever happens, we carry on with life with great inner peace and strength.
It's not a destination to reach, but a mental state to achieve. Learning about the well defined ways and means for that empowers us to reach that state and be there. But how do we get and maintain that inner peace and strength? More in further posts.... Don't forget to drop in your comments....
I think managing our expectations is the key to success. you can almost always be happy if you manage your expectations very well.
ReplyDeleteGood starting point, Ananth. Managing expectations is one key aspect. May be I don't expect anything, what do we do when bad stuff happens? We need a kind of framework of life which will help us hold our own and manage stuff like expectations and more throughout. Will add more in further posts... I believe we have always had a robust and time tested answer in our spiritual ways. But we mostly only have the form now and forgot the concept over a period of time. My attempt is to convey the spiritual framework in contemporary idiom, so that everyone appreciates the richness of the concept and its relevance now. It can be a good knowledge sharing exercise, which is my intent - whether we buy in to it or not is immaterial.
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