Let's close our eyes.
What if there is an option to put all your worries on a pause?
Would you exercise that option?
The reason I ask this pointed question is because we've been used to being in problems,
Surrounded by problems,
Worries.
That at some level we have become,
For lack of a better word,
Addicted to them.
Like I can narrate a personal incident.
Like most of the times,
For me,
The work is very much go,
Go,
Go,
Go,
Go.
There's some fire all the time.
There's some deadline that is approaching.
It's always a race against time.
And when all deadlines have been met,
Those one or two days when things are quiet,
It feels weird.
It feels incomplete in some strange way,
Bored even.
So the mind goes on its quest to find drama.
And it doesn't matter.
The drama could be at work,
Could be at home,
Could be anywhere.
All the mind needs sometimes is drama.
And all this doesn't happen at a conscious level.
Of course,
Nobody would actively go and seek problems and stress in life.
It just happens in a very sneaky way.
That's why this pointed question that if there was an option to pause all our troubles,
Would you take it?
I was listening to a talk by a very famous teacher.
And he was narrating this exact idea in a very profound way.
So let me share it with you all.
In this story that he was narrating,
He said,
The president of this country goes to this prison on the Independence Day and announces to the prisoners that today,
Whatever you wish for will be granted.
And the prisoners were really happy.
So each prisoner started putting their demands in front of the president.
And one prisoner said,
Oh,
We need better soaps in the prison.
We need cleaner toilets.
We need better blankets,
Thicker blankets.
We need books,
Et cetera,
Et cetera.
And then this last prisoner came to the president and said,
I want to be free from this prison.
And the president,
As he was granting all the wishes previously,
He said,
Your wish is granted as well.
And then all the rest of the prisoners said,
Oh,
We want to be free as well.
But then the president said,
You didn't ask for it.
You're going to get your soaps and blankets and et cetera.
Because when we are in the midst of these things,
They become routine.
We forget about freedom.
We forget about peace.
We want things slightly better while being in our prisons,
In our cage,
In our golden handcuffs,
Being surrounded by structure,
Authority,
Obscurity has become such a common place that even if somebody was capable of offering us freedom,
We wouldn't even recognize or it wouldn't even occur to us that,
Oh,
I could ask for freedom here.
Don't get me wrong.
All of us desire freedom.
All of us desire peace at the core of the heart.
But the familiar is mediocrity.
Familiar is being in a prison.
Familiar is complaining.
Familiar is dreaming about ending all the problems.
A question like this takes all our dreams away.
We don't have anything to look forward to if you have to really answer this question.
That is,
If there was an option to pause all our problems,
All our worries,
All our stresses,
Would you take it?
If peace and happiness was right in front of us,
Would we take it?
Because for us to take that,
We have to give up everything else that we are striving for.
Because eventually what we are striving for is peace and happiness,
But we don't know what to do in the absence of that striving.
So somehow striving has become the goal.
Fighting,
Struggling has become the goal.
Pursuit has become the goal.
Because whatever is worth pursuing,
Whatever is worth getting,
Needs to be long term.
So if we are pursuing peace and happiness,
We are not pursuing momentary peace and happiness.
We are pursuing whatever it is that we are pursuing in terms of material things or situations.
We don't tell ourselves,
Oh,
After I get this,
I'll be happy for like two minutes.
No.
We think we will be happy for the rest of our lives,
Forever after.
But if it is forever after,
It should be present even today.
And if it is not present today,
It won't be forever after either.
I think we are all smart people to understand that peace and happiness needs to be accessible today for it to be available tomorrow.
There is this fear of letting go the familiar,
Because even though it is painful,
Even though it is torturous,
It is still familiar.
What is scarier is the unfamiliar,
The uncertain,
The unknown.
That's why we tolerate pain.
That's why we tolerate drama.
That's why we tolerate all kinds of things in our life.
Because what if the other option is worse than this?
And given our survival brain,
We always anticipate worse things than better things.
We never think that,
Oh,
Yeah,
This idea might work.
No,
We are sure this idea won't work.
It's always the bad that we anticipate.
That's why we tolerate what we have in our life.
And as long as we are tolerating what we have,
We are going to get what we are getting.
Life doesn't give us what we want.
Life gives us what we tolerate.
And that's why you will see that whatever is your base level state of mind on a daily basis,
That is more or less a repetition.
It's a cycle that is going on.
And every few days,
Every few weeks,
The curve peaks.
And every few days,
A few weeks,
The curve dips.
And our life is more or less a rhyme of all this again and again.
Different triggers,
Different peaks,
Different valleys,
But more or less similar stuff.
And then what we try is within that prison,
We try to ask for a better soap.
We ask for a better blanket because somehow we have resigned to this rhyme.
But our heart is not satisfied with this,
That somehow it has been pushed in the background so far away that fear of the unknown,
The momentum of the familiar is loud and is active.
I understand the mind's predisposition to keep things status quo because that's how we are survived as a species.
So it's a residue of our evolution and it has its own purpose in life in certain occasions,
But definitely not a way of living everyday life.
We are not in jungles anymore,
Hunting animals,
Protecting ourselves.
No,
We are not in that.
We are a civilized society and a sign of maturity would be to mature from survival to thriving,
To blossoming,
To living fully,
To understand these mechanisms that are in place and yet choose thriving.
This freedom that we feel,
The freedom of being able to pursue happiness and jettison unhappiness is no trivial freedom.
All of us are capable of being happy for the rest of our life.
And by happy I mean peaceful,
Accepting,
Fulfilled,
Even amidst problems.
And this doesn't come out of studying,
It comes out of recognizing,
Recognizing that I've had worse problems in my life and smaller problems than these.
No matter what,
I'm here,
Despite everything that has happened in my life,
I'm here,
Full,
I'm completely here.
It's not that a part of me was lost 15 years ago in that tragic event,
No,
I'm still here.
That recognition is our own recognition,
It's not borrowed recognition.
And the thing about our own recognition is it can start growing,
It can start colonizing different areas of our life if given an opportunity.
And today can be that opportunity for all of us to not settle for lack of peace,
To not settle for an unconscious life.
Life is not just about dealing or coping with what life brings us,
But it's about having fun and celebrating despite all that life throws at us.
And it's a matter of perspective.
You can take either option.
There's no right or wrong answer.
Each choice has a corresponding quality of life.
Two people can decide to skydive at the same time.
One could be terrified and the other could be having fun.
Now we could argue the one who is terrified has all these childhood problems.
But when can we start arguing for having fun?
We always have an argument or justification or rationalization for pain.
All we need to do is find one reason to be able to overcome that pain.
Although it is justified,
Can I overcome that justification?
That goes back to that freedom that we feel we have to make these kind of choices.
And there are plenty of examples around us who have done it,
Who have spoken about it.
They must have done it in one area of their lives,
But a decision is a decision.
It can be extrapolated or translated in other areas of our lives as well if we wanted to.
And don't get me wrong.
This is one of the hardest decisions you will make.
But this one decision has the potential to revolutionize the quality of your life.
And this decision is purely an internal decision.
Everybody doesn't have to behave a certain way.
Something doesn't need to happen or not happen for us to make this decision.
Then it's a very easy decision.
Everyone would have made it by now.
But I want you to see that it's a decision first to not tolerate this in our life.
It's like when you stop tolerating clutter in your house,
Things automatically,
Automagically become organized.
What to do,
How to do it is only a matter of strategy and figuring it out.
Why to do is what we are talking about here or whether to do or not.
Decisions are not a problem unless we want them to be a problem for us.
Every problem is like a life and death situation for us.
It doesn't have to be that way.
We can tread lightly through life and we don't have to do it alone either.
This is a safe space.
There is a community and there are many more safe communities where this can be done together.
Whether we are smarter and stronger than any of us,
The easiest choice is to live an unhappy life because we are in a momentum of doing so.
But the hardest choice is to live a happy life,
A peaceful life.
And it requires,
It mandates us to discard everything that is not serving us,
Especially our decisions to tolerate unhappiness.
But once you make this difficult choice,
Once you start executing that difficult choice,
You'll realize that it's way easier to make this choice than to make the other choice of being unhappy because why would you?
So it's only difficult or it's only hardest in juxtaposition to the current way of things which seems easy out of practice.
And we are all capable of practicing whatever we want,
Provided we want it.
If given an opportunity to pause all our struggles,
All our conflicts,
All our unhappiness,
Would you take it?
Thank you.
