Living Life

Books in Short — 3

It is a common saying in India, “How quickly the time has passed”. Lets analyse how we process time.

When you are living in the moment, it may seem easy or seem painful. It depends upon your orientation. If you are living painfully, the current moment may seem like an eternity. If you are living joyfully, the current time seems like a moment.

So can we say that time though absolute, our perception of it is can bend it. It can be related to light, where there are multiple wavelength of light present, we only observe the visible spectrum.

Similarly, our observation of time makes it malleable, even when time is absolute.

Knowing this shouldn’t we then live joyfully every moment rather than living painfully and stretching it to make it our own version of hell?

How to make every moment joyful?

Our minds are impressions of information and thoughts. The type of thoughts we engage with continue to repeat. This is our minds way of saying these are the thoughts the person likes, so lets continue this story to keep him engaged.

We can break this cycle by allowing negative thoughts their space. It means we acknowledge that we are having a painful thought and then let it pass. We do not need to get involved with the thought. It becomes painful only when we tune to the dance of that thought. Its not easy, but once you get hang of it it becomes easy and life itself becomes a dance. This is not spiritual but the right way to live life.

You have a negative thought, now there are 2 paths. The first one is keep on thinking about it, going nowhere. The other one is to understand the thought and then work on what the thought wants to convey. For example, you fear flying, you can either continue to think all the things that can go wrong, or you acknowledge you fear flying and choose to travel via other mode, or check for information on how safe it is to fly, or if its your career that asks you to fly, choose one that doesn’t require you to fly.

This is not to say not to be aspirational, or to be content. This is simply to live peacefully.

Isn’t that what life is all about? To live? From the moment we start accessing our conscious brain, all of us stop living life. We are always waiting for something to happen in the future. The future is here and now. You live this moment joyfully or this is gone.

Source — The complete works of Swami Vivekananda, Karma, The happiness trap, Cognitive Fitness