Life will be difficult and full of challenges - it’s part of the job description.
Let’s get real and address the elephant in the room.
A casual 5 minute scroll through your favourite social media platform will most likely emphasize one very specific idea: that you, yes YOU, can and should have the best life possible!
Now how can anyone argue with that? Surely one must be insane to advocate anything other than that, and I suppose on a certain level, that would be an absolutely correct assessment of the situation.
However there is a trap in this belief (which extends well beyond the scope of social media), and more people fall in it that you can possibly imagine. The trap is this: the expectation that life can be free of suffering, free of worry, free of fear, and free of anxiety. That somehow, somewhere, someone will give you something, tell you something, or teach you something that will just take all those troublesome emotions away, just like in that classic and very sad movie ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’.
Unfortunately, anyone who sells you such a promise is very simply misleading you. It doesn’t matter if the person saying it is a priest, a guru, a philosopher, or even (god forbid!) a therapist – it’s an expectation that will always lead to even further suffering and disappointment.
Even Freud, the great popularizer of the idea that we can overcome the trauma and suffering in our lives jokingly but very seriously stated that perhaps it would be best if our goal would be to turn our misery into ordinary unhappiness.
I know that none of this is fashionable to point out in today’s day and age, but I think that it is important to share all of the above so that you can save yourself an extraordinary amount of money, time and disappointment.
An old saying suggests that if you meet the Buddha in your path, kill him. While perhaps a bit overly dramatic, what this aims to convey is that if you meet someone who claims to know ‘the Way’, that means that they clearly do NOT know ‘THE Way’, so save yourself from the temptation to follow such a person.
Instead, perhaps it is more helpful to shift our expectations towards something more realistic: that even though life is difficult, we can still find ways to cope with our hardships and our suffering so that we can somehow continue onwards in a meaningful manner.
Life will be difficult and full of challenges - it’s part of the job description. But that’s OK, since at the end of the day you are a human being and you are allowed to feel that it’s difficult, because it is.
So let go of the burden that you should somehow become super-human and not feel any suffering any more and instead enjoy the journey for what it is: ups and downs which, hopefully, we can all somehow make the most of.
