Over at The Tao of Chaos, blogger SA Barton has a wonderful piece entitled, "Yelling at the Universe". The focus of that post is how, when life isn't going the way we expect or desire, too many of us have the tendency to want to wallow in our misery. As Barton writes, we want to yell at the universe for being, somehow, unfair to us.
If our outburst or sorrow is short-lived, there's actually nothing wrong with being a bit cross, sad or upset when life seems to be going against us. In my mind's eye, it is far better to release the emotional angst than to bottle it up. Repressed emotions have a way of eating up a person from the inside out.
But the astute point Barton makes is one I agree with wholeheartedly: if you don't like the way your life is going, work to change it. You may not be as successful as you would hope, but the work of trying to change your circumstance is an end unto itself. It's when we focus on the effort to change that the final goal loses a good measure of its importance.
This is not to say that a person's goals are unimportant; it's more to say that traveling the road to where we want to go has its own merit.
If our outburst or sorrow is short-lived, there's actually nothing wrong with being a bit cross, sad or upset when life seems to be going against us. In my mind's eye, it is far better to release the emotional angst than to bottle it up. Repressed emotions have a way of eating up a person from the inside out.
But the astute point Barton makes is one I agree with wholeheartedly: if you don't like the way your life is going, work to change it. You may not be as successful as you would hope, but the work of trying to change your circumstance is an end unto itself. It's when we focus on the effort to change that the final goal loses a good measure of its importance.
This is not to say that a person's goals are unimportant; it's more to say that traveling the road to where we want to go has its own merit.
Frustration is natural and normal. Which is good news, because I feel it often. It just lasts minutes now instead of the days it used to. The work we do doesn’t always go right, and when it does it takes time to build results. That’s how stuff works, and no form of temper tantrum is going to alter that. Things work how they work, so it is best to learn how to work along with them. That’s the very short version of just about every decent Taoist story ever. It means nothing more profound than work for what you want, no matter what that is.
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