“…Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
-Viktor Frankl
We can have everything in life but not see it. We can have nothing and yet find beauty on every corner. A good attitude is one of our greatest assets.
This world is so wrapped around getting more, chasing more, becoming more. While that’s a fine thing, if you only have more, you’ll forever and endlessly be chasing more. If that’s the only thing you have, you'll never be able to stop and appreciate what you have.
Without a robust ability to be content with the way things are, it is also incredibly easy to get lost and despondent and frustrated that life doesn’t seem to be working out for us. Any little road bump or series of road bumps can seriously mess us up. It can be so quick to fall into a pit of despair; one that is steep and slippery to climb out of.
You need to find enough now because now is the one and only thing we know for certain, ever. Everything else is a guess. Aspirations are cool and necessary, but they are always future things. Unless you happen to be ticking a box right now, achieving is rarely here and now.
I know this because I’ve learnt through experience.
I used to be incredibly impatient. I remember burning up from the inside out, wanting what I wanted to be here yesterday. I started on a spiritual path and just brought the same burning desire for change and to be different with me. I wanted it all here, now, and could rarely find ease, peace, satisfaction until I calmed down and remembered that I could choose to be satisfied, and not wait for it to be caused.
And this is one of the fundamentals of any spiritual path:
We choose.
We have to choose, otherwise life will choose for us. Sometimes life will look good and so we feel good. Sometimes life will look horrendous and so we become horrendous. When life chooses, we are just along for the ride.
Free yourself from the rollercoaster of life. Learn to choose to be independent and unconditional instead.
Depend not on an uncertain future but have certainty and completeness in this moment, in the middle of chaos and the incomplete, the changing, and the unsatisfactory. No matter where you are heading or what you want, be unconditionally content with the way things are. Seek to change, for sure, but base all wanting to make a difference in what is here; the way life is.
Finding enough doesn’t mean stop. It doesn’t mean you lose your drive. It doesn’t mean you don’t care.
It means appreciate, be grateful, put things in perspective, stop stressing, grasping and struggling. Go with, not against. Like splitting firewood with an axe, crack the problem along the grain with the smallest amount of force. This can require patience and time as you come into greater understanding - so stand back. See the big picture.
Allow. Give life the time and space to develop, to show you, to open up. Enjoy every single step on the journey to more. Have so much of enough that any little bit of more is just the greatest thing.
Alrighty? This is a choice. And the more you make it, the more it becomes a habit.
Go well!
Arjuna