Every place you don’t want to be at feels like a prison. And we have so many desires, expectations and go back to the past and think about the future so often, that I can safely say that we live in such a prison all the time.So each time you wish you were somewhere else right now is another solid wall you build and thus make this imaginary building even stronger.
Often we suffer because we don’t realize what’s essential.We may want to be rich, but the rich are lonely.We see all those people on TV that have won the lottery and want to be at their place, but studies show that they are even more miserable after having won the big check. They don’t really know what to do with all that money, take poor decisions on how to spend them, change themselves and their friends don’t see them in the same way.
Kids want to be grown ups, adults want to be young and careless again.Single people desperately want a relationship, but those who are in one still complain almost all the time and wish for freedom.The poor want money, the rich want more of it.This means that changing your situation doesn’t prevent you from suffering, doesn’t make your desires go away.So you need to change something on the inside.
Our heads are full of comparisons, needs for approval and attention, a desire to be at other places, imagining things could be better there and thus hating our reality.We are the only ones to blame for our own suffering.We hurt ourselves every time we think of how other people should behave according to our standards and then suffer when they appear to be individuals; every time we open a book with so many expectations about it from what we’ve heard and hoped it to be, and then close it in disappointment, realizing it’s something totally different (maybe beautiful, inspiring and challenging, but nothing that met our expectations).
Most of the pain we experience, whether we realize it or not, comes from the fantasies we live in.We create our own worlds, where there are certain rules, things to be done and said and events to happen. And every time that doesn’t go according to the plan (which, basically, means anything because we have no control over what might happen and can’t predict it), we panic.