Everything we have, everything we know, and everyone we love will someday be gone. We will all be gone someday too.
Permanence is a delusion, and although the idea of permanence can sometimes be comfortable—making us feel secure and stable—it can also make us unprepared for the changes in our lives.
If we feel we can maintain our lives just the way they are in any given moment, we will invariably be frustrated and disappointed.
Looking, waiting, and wondering.
Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?
It’s a very common thing to constantly be looking forward to, planning for, or thinking about something coming up.
There often seems to an implicit assumption that the future will be, in some way, better than now. But the truth is that the light at the end of the tunnel is overrated. It always looks better than it is, and it never quite arrives.
The trick is to make the tunnel our own. With the right perspective, the tunnel itself can become the light.
Have you ever had a burning desire for something that you couldn’t have?
How did you handle it?
We all have desires: relationships, jobs, things. Sometimes we get what we want, and sometimes we don’t. It’s often difficult to accept when we fail. We try to figure out different ways of getting something we may never have. This is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we remain honest with ourselves about our actions and our motives.
Failure is an option.
What’s the worst thing that can happen?
As we go through our lives, we each make decisions about what we are going to do – in our jobs and in our personal lives, the big things and the small things, the important and the trivial. Part of what goes into those decisions are the consequences if we fail.
If we think we might fail, we worry that we’ll waste our time, that we could get hurt or embarrassed, or that the consequences will be dire. We fear failure. We worry about failure. We try to avoid failure.
But if we only do things that guarantee success, we are doing ourselves a disservice. We are not exploring our own personal boundaries. We are not testing ourselves. We’ll never find out what we’re made of.
People often want something different, something more. We find it quite hard to see the potential for happiness in the present, even when the present is fantastic. Even during our “most exciting times,” we tend to think about what’s coming next. On vacation, we’re thinking of the next day’s surfing, of the friends coming to visit, of the great dinner we’re going to have. It’s hard for us to “just be,” to eek out all the joy in what is happening right here, right now.