People often go on vacations to escape. But what are they escaping from?
Is it their daily routine? The stress? The burdens of maintaining some semblance of having it together while they trudge through the days?
In reality, it's none of that.
After all, that's all the external world. Just like when I ask you what you want, and you say endless opportunities to travel, behind that you really just want a constant state of joy, love, enthusiasm, and inner peace. You just think the travel will give you that.
So with the negative it's also true. We think we want to escape from all those things in our lives, the mundane, the routine, the stress. But those are just things. They are not good, or bad.
It's our reaction to those things that we're trying to escape. It's our inner feeling towards those things.
We experience the events that unfold in front of us, and we either react peacefully by participating in them, or we resist and decide we can't handle them. When it's all said and done, we get so tired of this, that we're really just trying to escape from all that resisting.
We're tired of pushing back life's forces. When we get stressed, we're essentially pushing back on life what life has to offer us, strictly on the basis that we don't like it, because it doesn't fit our preferences of how things should be.
But who are we to decide how things should be? This universe, let alone our tiny blue spec of a planet, has been around for 13.8 billions of years, and it will continue to be long after we're gone. So we have the right to decide how it should be?
Of course not! That doesn't mean we put up with injustice or let anything evil happen on our watch. It just means we stop fighting every single little thing that life presents us if it doesn't perfectly match our preferences.
Can you do that? Can we do that? Can we at least try?
So if you're going on a vacation, that's fine. I am too. But don't let it be because you need an escape from your everyday life. If that's the case, it won't be long until you're back and ready for another one.
Why not try to escape the resistance you create when things don't go your way, and instead learn to participate and harmonize with life?
Live with substance!
Gabe Orlowitz
