These days, people are obsessed with fast. Fast food, fast service, fast living, fast everything. Many of them are not able to manage this fast pace and here is where problems start. Our bodies and minds have not evolved as fast as the world around us, so now we are overwhelmed, with no apparent solution to this.
What if the solution is counterintuitive? What if you need to go slower, to provide time for your body and your mind to recover? You have focused on doing as many things as you can, more, if possible, and you are starting to feel the burn.
Slow down, do fewer things, and enjoy the time in between. Being fast is not the same as being efficient. You can still do many of the things that are important to you, but you’ll need to go about them one by one. When you learn to focus on one thing at a time, you’ll discover that, funny enough, you’ll be able to do more work than before, but with less stress.
We humans are strange beings. We can’t always be working, nor always be relaxing, just like we can’t be always happy, nor always sad. It’s not that we don’t try to stay as much as possible in this extreme, but it’s not good for us.
The only way we know to evaluate if something is good is by comparing it with something bad. So, to know what joy is, you need to experience sadness, and to be relaxed you need to be busy for a while. Slow down and learn to alternate doing with being. It will give you a new view of life.
As individuals, we have always been interested in making things better for ourselves, and for the group we are part of. For a long time, this was a necessity because it improved the chances of survival, but in the current times, we seem to be running from everything that hurts.
In truth, every progress starts in adversity, and growth almost always implies pain. When you exercise, your muscles rip to allow growth to happen. The hermit crab sheds its shell to grow, in a painful process that takes four to five days.
There is pain when you take your first breath as a baby, because your lungs need to adapt to breathing air, after living in a liquid environment for the last nine months. If you look back on your life and are honest with yourself, you’ll find moments when you had to hurt before you got what you wanted.
Humans are designed to adapt to new conditions. All conditions are new before you get used to them. You are looking for comfort, and when you find it, you convince yourself that is all you need. After some time, you get bored and start craving for change, while at the same time fearing it.
This dual state is true for every moment in life, and none of the extremes will do you good if you stay there for too long. That is why you find yourself constantly running. When you understand that you need both, stress and comfort to be present in your life, you’ll stop running, and then learn to use both to help yourself grow.
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