Do you also sometimes feel that there are far too many things crowding in on you, needing to be done? Do you feel like you are standing in an unruly queue, constantly being jostled by your obligations and commitments? Do you wish you had nothing on your ‘to do’ list, no unanswered emails in your inbox, no people to call back or appointments to keep? Do you feel a deep nostalgia for childhood, in which all these things were taken care of? (if you were fortunate, that is). And do you now yearn to feel that peace again?
That is how Watashi wa often feels, despite having very little noise in his life: no wife or children, no employer, no clients. No stress, right?
Wrong. There is always a ‘to do’ list. If it is not imposed from outside, then your mind will create one. Your small egoic mind, that is. But it is no less oppressive, no less invasive for being self-generated. Perhaps more so? The most damaging attitudes are those that have been internalized.
This is not news. We have all been told that ‘the devil finds work for idle hands.’ But maybe we don’t realise that we carry the devil around inside us, in the form of that nagging voice that will not let us feel peace, that constantly wants us to do rather than just to be.
We will never check everything off our ‘to do’ list. Each time something is removed, something else appears – like whack-a-mole, like the serpentine tresses of a gorgon. It is in the nature of our mind to find things that need doing, and to convince us that they are important (and then to bask in the reflected glory of that importance).
When can we complete the ‘to do’ list? With the right job? With marriage? With the first million? With retirement? Ha!
Life is a ‘to do’ list. It is never completed, just disposed of (unfinished) when we die. We have to learn to enjoy the process of addressing the individual items on the list, while knowing that we will never complete the list. And we have to learn how to step back from the list from time to time, to see it from a different angle and not attribute too much importance to it (despite what our small mind tells us).
We have to stop thinking that we will be happy once we have constituted the world a certain way. We walk around with a mental model of how we want the world to be, and we only allow ourselves to be happy for the brief moments when the mental model happens to coincide with our actual experience. But that is a very tenuous way to live, and it assumes that we have far more control over things than we actually do.
When will everything be ok? When we are ok with everything, and not before. The decision not to worry is primary. If we commit to that decision over and over again, then our lived experience will reflect it. The mental event precedes the lived experience, and not the other way around.
This, at least, is Watashi wa’s view.
watashi-wa in the snow 