Letting go: a quick guide to inner peace

Unhappiness is the difference between what you have and what you want. Frustration is the prime symptom of unhappiness. With our hectic and money-focused modern lifestyle, frustration has become as common as breathing. It leads us to feeling helpless, angry and insecure.

When we are frustrated we lose patience and the ability to be civil to others. This generation needs patience more than its predecessors. Those were the days when people received letters by the snail mail post, weeks after they were sent and they would welcome them with enthusiasm and excitement. Now we are complaining about our computer speed and how we can improve it by nanoseconds. We have taken our speedy information access and work beyond human levels with our man-made machines and now we have grown impatient with any activity that is slow and time-consuming. Thus, impatience has become a social disease.

How do we cultivate patience? One word: FAITH. We must learn to have faith in our fate and ourselves. Faith that, in the end, everything is meant to be fine, and if it’s not as we anticipated then it’s not the end. Order, rather than chaos is the ultimate goal of the universe. So whenever you look, look at the bigger picture, which is the more accurate one. Remember, “Our patience will achieve more than our force,” said Edmund Burke.

The other thing we tend lose quickly is our head. The familiar demons of temper outbursts and long-abiding anger keep haunting us. This happens because either we try to control situations according to our rules or we believe that we haven’t been given enough control by others. Let us get one thing as clear. For whatever reason we might be here, it has nothing to do with controlling anything. So why stretch?

Now, how do you keep a cool head? Again, one word: AVOID. Try to reduce your passion for the things that arouse your anger. Try not to belong to the things that hurt you. The only thing you belong to is your spirit. Everything else is meant to distract or destroy you – but only if you allow it to happen. If there’s a particular person, reason, or passion that test your temper then remove it from your life or get yourself out of the situation. Escape it or avoid it.

The only unavoidable thing in life is death.

Finally to sign it off….Life’s real wisdom lies in taking serious things lightly and light things seriously.