Mental Stress And How We Create It
It’s a strange situation really, but almost every person you’ll ever meet wants to be in a different place from where they are. And so in their dissatisfaction, they create mental stress for themselves.
Some want a different financial situation. Others want to be around different people. Or have a different career focus.
But where you are is not an accident. It’s where all the strands in your life meet up for a temporary summit. It’s exactly where you are supposed to be. It’s only when you master what’s in front of you that you can move onto the next stage in your life.
Where You Are Is What You’ve Been Given
I watch the same dynamics with my Daughters and their homework. My eldest daughter used to struggle with numeracy. Because I knew this and also knew that she couldn’t get through school without learning the times tables, I wanted to make it easier for her to learn them.
So we made her an mp3 she could listen to as she went to sleep. I bought a program that makes learning them a game. Then I even went through the whole times tables stripping out all the duplicates (e.g 4×6 and 6×4).
Still though she made no serious attempt to learn them. Instead she would scream and rage that she couldn’t learn them, it was too hard and why did she have to. I admitted defeat and left her to it.
A month or two later, came the time when she was about to be tested. For almost two hours she raged about the unfairness, injustice and difficulty. Eventually she just burned herself out and decided to get on with learning them. Literally ten minutes later she knew them enough to get 11 out of 12.
It was a good lesson for me that however easy you try to make things for people, it makes no difference until they want to do it. And it was a good experience for her as she learned that just getting on with it, is often easier than thinking about it.
And that’s the point of that anecdote. Where our life becomes difficult, where we feel negative emotion it’s always because our focus has slipped from dealing with what’s in front of us to how we feel about what we have to deal with.
You see life is not about getting everything in your life straightened into a tidy, orderly line. Life is chaos. It’s the chaos and the stuff that knocks you off your balance that causes us to dig deeper and bring more of what we are at our core through into the world. It makes us discover what we really are about. It’s in these moments that we find who we are and what we can really do.
photo credit: Lachlan Hardy
Once you overcome your resistence to the situation and instead focus on grappling with the issues in front of you, you start to become engaged and so your mood lightens and you become happier. Just the fact that you know you are on the path to solving the situation, even if the facts haven’t changed is enough to change your mood.
As this happens your mental bandwidth, the amount of attention and inspiration you receive increases and so you find the strand that unravels the knot that was blocking the path to your goal.
And so once you take away the conflict that you felt about the situation and instead focus on dealing with the situation, you move past it.
The paradox of life is that it is not accepting where we are, that holds us back from where we want to be. Whatever the circumstances are in your life that you are unhappy with, you have to come to an acceptance of and then be able to be happy with where you are and working towards what you want.
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That was class Rob, Cheers!
Its a fact. The more we resist a change or situation, the more we make our life difficult. The success of a person is how readily he accepts the change and adjusts with it, ignoring all the 'whys' like why me, why again, why now, why not before, etc. This acceptance is something that has to be done sooner or later. Even if you want to get out of that situation or change and revert it, you first need to accept the existance of change.
There are certain insights or explanations that ring true immediately and this is one of them. The move to acceptance is something however, that I've wrestled with on an emotional level.
In my case a divorce that hit me hard and a subsequent hanging on provides the dilemma. I don't want the reality of my kids having to deal with it. I don't want them to miss out on the "family" experience they were to have. So accepting it sometimes feels the same as abandoning what was.
There is something in the last line of Robs post though, that is likely the answer to this. Working toward (forward) something is certainly different than trying to go back. At the very least, it's the door that's always open.
Thanks Osh.
Good point Ayesha, that's something I don't think I made clear, but you do have to face it, So it's easier to do so straight away.
Brian, having two young kids I can understand exactly those same concerns. I think though, like you say, you have to look at the destination you want to get to. In your case, giving as much of yourself as you can to your kids.
Then you can see that there are many paths that lead to the same destination. It's like taking a detour around roadworks. In the end you still get to the same destination.
It's funny how things workout, but some people do find that they can have more quality focused time with their kids after separating because their time is free of the day to day pressures of living.
I always try to give my kids an outlet. What I mean is if they've argued with my wife, they can talk to me about it and vice versa. Then they don't feel isolated or that everyone's against them (well they still do). Being outside of the home puts you in a very powerful place to do this.
Good article!
Great article Rob. As humans we have to accept the reality that life comes with challenges. And we become stronger when we faced the storms in our lives with boldness and courage. Remenbering always to give thanks in every situation, whether they be good or bad.