Focus On The Essential

A lot of people feel that life is a burden because they have made life a burden for themselves. When you get all trapped in attachments, you begin to reorganize your life. For some people, this starts fresh out of the womb. I know parents in New York City who are fretting over getting their kids into the best pre-schools.

That starts the cycle of attachment and disappointment pretty early. These attachments and conditions don’t make anyone happier in a non-fleeting sense, and yet they persist out out sheer mindlessness and delusion. The more people subscribe to the idea that external things can make them happy, the more invested they become in this delusion. And the more invested you become in a delusion, the more you tend to organize the day-to-day details of your life around fulfilling abstract wants and needs that have no basis in reality.

We obsess over the strangest details just because we see them as tangentially related to some sort of higher goal. The problem with this is that there is no higher goal. All you have is today. You can either do what you think you’re supposed to do, or follow your heart.

You can still feed and clothe yourself and be comfortable if you follow your heart. These two things aren’t mutually exclusive, but Western people seem to think that they are because they’ve become so deeply entrenched in goal-oriented thinking and goal-oriented sacrifice.