When we were in school, we were taught to identify and solve problems. In our daily lives, we fill our minds with problems so that we can try and solve them. More than ever, a lot of these problems involve quite a bit of thinking. And so we try to deal with the problems by thinking harder. But we might be confused. Confused by the experience of being in school, and taking exams. We start to think that the testings of life is like sitting in an examination hall, given pen and paper, forced to think and recall facts, or looking through reference materials, looking for an answer.
Life sometimes throws us problems that we have to sit with. And to mull over; but to be willing to drop off the problem and not think about it for a while. Perhaps to let our subconscious take over instead. But during these periods, we need to be freed, our minds must get to relax. Yet in the high stressed, fast paced life nowadays, we don’t give ourselves much chance to. We are punishing ourselves all the time, stressing, straining.
It is not the weight of life’s problems, it is the length of time we’re holding it up in our minds and trying to get to an answer, trying to come to a point when we can toss out the problem from our backyard. How about leaving it in the backyard, sitting with it, and re-casting it as a part of the backyard landscape rather than a ‘problem’. Likewise, to not be too anxious to ‘get out’ of a situation (especially when it is not exactly life-threatening, just tricked into feeling so by our minds).
We need to graduate from school; and stop treating life as an exam. Because then we will never leave the exam stress behind.