This truth will frequently be remembered: the human mind is the main source of our afflictions. If you were to awaken and be made aware of the fact that your mind is the engine behind great amounts of your distress, then the majority of your sorrows and your troubles would disappear from your soul.
Let’s explore how our mind augments our suffering: when we feel an emotion, have an unpleasant experience or simply when we live an event, the person lacks the perspective or the distance to judge objectively the dimensions of the lived experience. The event becomes absolute due to our proximity and a lack of a point of comparison, and due to this we suffer enormously. Bitter tears are wept over things that tomorrow will hold no importance. It is folly to anguish over things that today are clamors and tomorrow will be silence.
The moment you start to feel that you have been victim of a misfortune, and you begin to think that the world knows no reality other than your displeasure, in that moment if you were to become aware of what is happening and would think that everything is relative, and that things pass, quickly you would feel a great burden lifted from your heart! How many anguishing moments would be reduced to its minimum expression!
To consider an event as relative does not mean to distort it, nor is it hiding one´s head in the sand pretending you don´t see the danger. On the contrary, it is about situating the events in their true perspective and dimension. To situate an experience as relative is to objectify it, it is about being objective.
We see how people on a daily basis live their lives going from one shock to another, living each negative event as the beginning and end of everything, as though the destiny of the world depended on it, however it is plain to see no event is absolute, that everything is relative. Our experiences of events are like a river, they flow, and they will pass, never to return.
If you were to apply this reflection to your family life, you would see that last month’s terrible emergency is today a forgotten fact. What has proven to be so frightening today in a months’ time will be but a simple memory.
Let’s remain attentive to each worry and unpleasant experience we face, let us become aware of the relativity of everything that happens to us. By understanding that these events are relative we can eliminate important amounts of suffering.
By becoming calm and taking control of yourself you will be able to put in perspective those painful facts and rise above the unforeseen events and the emergencies that come from your life. When this happens life will be full of harmony and joy, and those around you will become contagious by your liberation.
Be happy, diminish your suffering! Christ makes it possible
Based on Fr Ignacio Larrañaga’s book, The art of being happy
