Space is a concept

©Alicia Jamtaas

“There’s no space for everything,” was a constant complaint. Hoarders have this incessant problem. No room is every big enough for all their ever-growing belongings.

“We’ll make it,” he would reassure.

She was further agitated by his tranquil tenor; how could he not be worried?

There were boxes all around, inside rooms, out in the yard, in the attic. There was a bike in the living room and a cupboard on the porch.

It was too disorienting, and it aggravated the stress.

She left for a walk, but soon returned to find he had actually taken care of it all.

Also part of Friday Fictioneers

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Externalising the battles

The problem with keeping everything in your head and fighting your battles alone is that the stress and pressure you’re burdening yourself with will very often lead to unnecessary – and inexplicable to others – flippant remarks that cause further tension to your social relations.

What isn’t expressed, eats you up.

Our problems are usually smaller than we overthink them to be.

But if we don’t share them, we won’t easily find a solution for them.

Also part of Weekend Writing Prompt #266s

Wash your worries away

© David Stewart

There’s something relaxing about getting lost in nature. It is tremendously soothing to allow your mind to wander off, to stop perplexing over routine daily life problems, and merely enjoy the moment of all that the outdoors has to offer.

Water helps. The trickling of it calms your nerves, and the endless flow is actually better than any anti-depressant or tranquiliser.

Waterfalls are the best at this. They offer a combination of sight and sound, and if you’re bold enough, you can even dive into them to wash your worries away.

Just don’t take it so literally, and drown instead.

Also part of Friday Fictioneers

Sleep on it

There are many reasons to list as to what keeps you up at night. Environmental factors, too much stress, over-exposure to screens, jet lag, heavy food, medicine, or uncomfortable conditions are among them.

Romanticists claim you lie awake because you appear in someone else’s dream.

But in essence, we can’t sleep because we subconsciously burden ourselves with too many thoughts. We won’t allow ourselves to let go of everything that troubles our brains during the day. Consequently, we can’t find that much required peace to relax, to breathe out and alleviate the pressure we exert on ourselves.

We need constructive outlets to enable our minds to wander. To stop thinking for a while. To simply get lost in the moment.

Some would suggest meditation, but that’s not as easy as it sounds, and it requires great effort.

A more feasible solution is a walk on the beach, or even a dive into the sea. Salty water helps in washing away the problems, which we often create ourselves. It will get us feeling refreshed, relaxed, and revived. An essential process in assisting us to gather the courage to face everything that is causing us the initial stress.

We need to find time to escape our worries, if we are to find the strength to effectively deal with them. We can’t sleep on the decisions we need to make, if we can’t fall asleep to begin with.

Get out of your head

“The reason we trouble ourselves is because we prioritise one thought over another. And that former one is usually a source of negativity and hypothetical scenarios that may never even play out. We need to get out of our heads and live in the moment. To appreciate what we truly have now, we need to stop dwelling on the ‘ifs’”.

She looked at him silent.

He was right. But she was too stubborn to admit it.

He gazed into her eyes transmitting a calmness that radiated from the depths of his soul. Even his breathing held a tranquil rhythm. She could feel the serenity soothing her. How could she remain angry at him? And for no apparent reason.

“There are so many problems in the world. Serious ones. We don’t need to create more with our minds”, he said opening up his arms to embrace her in a forget-it-all-and-let-it-go hug.

Still she said nothing.

But she smiled, and her eyes lit up.

She loved him for this. For being able to comprehend her mood swings and loving her regardless.

It is what it is

©MCD_Budapest

“You know that nothing can kill you more than your own thoughts, right?” He looked at her sharply. Once again she was drowning herself, choking up on makeshift scenarios. He needed to be harsh to snap her out of it.

“We make up disasters in our heads, because we build too much expectation and then become devastated when it’s not fulfilled. Just let things be”.

“My grandma once said: The key to happiness is letting each situation be what it is, instead of what you think it should be”.

“So live the moments; it’s what composes life and it’s what you will remember”.

They say happiness doubles when shared. But what about sadness? Does that halve in magnitude? Because we tend to keep our misery bottled up, especially when we consider that everyone has problems of their own, many of which are more serious than ours.

But what if we choose to live those fleeting moments – those phantom pleasures that last only a bit – and we keep them to ourselves and only share them with a few close confidants?

What if when we return to reality, they seem like a dream? What if all we have to account for them are the photos we took but never uploaded anywhere? What if the only documented evidence of our fun was how it made us feel? How long will it last? And how will we make it endure for longer?

Why is it that whenever something good arrives, we have an innate fear that it will overturn, and that something bad will come to upset it all? Why do we allow ourselves to fall into that spiralling circle that messes up our minds? What if we just send out the optimism and positiveness we hope to receive; would that make fortune return to us?

Life is what it is. But that’s not always easy to accept. No matter what anyone tells us to do.

What we seek

There is a saying that if we seek something that same thing is seeking us. But, is this even true?

Because what is it that we’re really looking for?

We ourselves are unsure of what we want, what we’re searching, what we long for. We’ve created a world so complex and uncertain that nothing seems to be enough to make us feel complete. Be it love, happiness, money, career, or just calm, there is no real answer we can give.

The most certain thing is that we find it so easy to whine and nag about anything and everything. Like that childish game of crying it out until what you want is given to you. But the real world does not work that way. And we have a hard time comprehending that.

Perhaps humans don’t have the capacity to manage so much information at one time. Even during multitasking, there is something that lacks in quality. We seem to be running around in multiple directions, often without a concrete or clear purpose, that we end up neither living in the present nor planning for the future.

Our existence only gains purpose if we have a clear sense of what we’re doing now.

But we tend to overlook that.

And that’s where the problem starts.

Complications

Call it ‘complications’, ‘technical difficulties’, ‘unsurpassable obstacles’. For anyone in communications, it’s the simplest way of not naming a problem: just give it a vague definition.

We tend to do this with life itself. Things come our way that we do not really know how to handle or deal with – at least not at first. We find ourselves drowning in our sea of problems, of stomach-churning troubles, of migraine-inciting predicaments, we have no idea of how to solve.

Yet if we calm down just a bit; if we talk to someone just to get a clearer view, we realise that there are no real complications. In fact, we ourselves are causing the complexity to begin with.

There are only two ways to move ahead in life: you either want to or you don’t.

And the best method to decide is to listen to yourself – those body signs you often ignore: if it doesn’t feel right, it’s probably not. But if you’re thinking about it so much, it probably means it also matters enough for you to go forward with it.

Whatever you do, remember this: it may be better to live with remorse than regrets, but things are just as simple as our minds allow them to be.

Everything starts and ends with a healthy mind, a healthy attitude, and a healthy mentality.

Empathising difference

“All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, wrote Leo Tolstoy in the beginning of Anna Karenina in 1878.

Misery has many forms. And this is true for all people.

We don’t realise how insignificant or trivial our problems are until we hear what someone else is facing.

But what we often fail to acknowledge is that we don’t understand what other people are going through no matter how much they (try to) explain. It’s usually because we don’t really want to empathise. We’re better off worrying about our own microcosm-shattering problems: where to go out, what to do to pass the day, who to call for an outing, what to watch on TV, where to go on holiday. We quarrel among ourselves because we can’t coordinate to have fun, yet other people are facing evictions, money problems, job security; actual issues of survival.

It puts it all into perspective, doesn’t it?

Well, it should.

There is a truth in that in order to survive you need to be thick-skinned. You need to be somewhat insensitive, allowing things to slide, and refusing to be affected by them. If you’re too perceptive and impacted by everything, you’re the only one to lose.

Because no one really cares if you’re struggling – with work, with family, with pretty much anything. If you can’t follow suit in the fun and the expenditure, you’ll soon be cut off. And no one really cares what or how you work. It’s simple: if we don’t understand what you do, we’ll consider it as not very important, so you can always ‘leave it for later’ – but certainly not for the weekend or a holiday, or for when we already have plans.

We have a tendency to only view life through our own lenses. We obstinately refuse to walk in someone else’s shoes, or even make the slightest of efforts to share their perspective of reality.

And it’s a shame. Because united we could achieve so much. Instead, we ravage each other as if we’re trying to free up space in this world we’re destroying.

Instead of lifting each other up, we’re surreptitiously trying to tear each other down.

Filtering our focus

In a time of rapidly evolving channels of information, is the problem that we know too much, or that we think we do? We’re constantly trying to keep up with the tide, but it seems that something else beats us to the news. There is always something happening we know little to nothing about, or worse – we only know part of.

We hoard information from so many sources for later. Because there’s just too much to read out there, and there’s little time to do it in. No matter how fast you skim read, haven’t you found yourself skipping articles or emails, or saving them for later, if it’s more than three scrolls long? In this busy contemporary lifestyle, we need to get to the point quickly. We’ve become so easily distracted that things – people and conversations included – need to gain our focus fast (and keep it), otherwise they’re considered tiresome and unworthy of our attention.

It may be dubbed “first-world problems”, but let’s face it, this is the environment we live in. We need to adjust to survive.

This acute article that came my way from my inspiring boss who knows me all too well, resonated with me from the very first sentence. If you’re a reader, you know to the bone what it’s like to hoard reading material in all forms – paper and digital. You also apprehend what it feels like to tell yourself you’ll read it later, but instead keep elongating that list that never seems to get shorter or even at the least done. Perhaps the real problem though is not that we hoard too much, but rather that we fail to filter right. It is indeed unfeasible to read everything we would like; a lifetime would not suffice for that. But shouldn’t we be able to prioritise what’s important?

Like the people and things we devote our attention to, prioritising is important in maintaining a healthy, productive and sane lifestyle.

Just think about this: when you’re younger you usually make a habit of remembering everyone’s birthday, sending out celebratory wishes and attending as many parties as you can. But as you grow older, you begin to filter out people, keeping in your social circle those who matter, who enrich your life and who make you smile. Even if you do remember certain birthdays, you choose to celebrate those of value. And that’s what makes them more special. Because they belong to the selected list of few exceptional people.

Shouldn’t we be doing that with everything we dedicate our time and attention to? Otherwise, what’s the point, really?