How to remain calm and focused in our daily life?
5000 years ago, on the battlefield of Kurukshetra (now in India), stood the Pandava King Yudhisthira who had lost all of his property and even his wife in a pre-plotted game of gambling against Kauravas. He lost all the things that he had owned. Thus, the elders of the family decided to exile him with his brothers to save his family from further humiliation.
And after spending 13 years in the forest, now he had to fight against the entire Kaurava army to regain his kingdom. Yet, he was standing calmly and firmly waiting for the war to start.
Putting his family through all this humiliation was not enough? Now he was leading them into an unwinnable war!
How could he remain so peaceful and unworried, despite knowing that all the heavyweights of the world were standing on the other side of the battlefield? All he had was the support of his 4 brothers and Krishna (who was not even fighting for him).
Our situation is, nonetheless, the same as of Yudhisthira.
Where we are also facing some kind of abuse from people, organizations, or governments.
To name a few things which are making our mind unrestful right now.
- Being locked down in the house for more than 2 months.
- Loss of job and work.
- Losing our loved ones due to viruses.
- The constant rise of communal hatred, protests, and riots. Check the Twitter trending page anytime!
- And in some parts of the world, things have become so tensed up that there could be a new war!
All this negative news certainly makes our minds volatile and disturbed.
Well, the answer lies in this verse of Bhagavad Gita:
Fearlessness, cultivation of knowledge, charity, self-control, austerity, and simplicity; nonviolence, truthfulness, freedom from anger, tranquility, aversion to faultfinding, compassion and freedom from covetousness; gentleness, modesty, and steady determination; vigor, forgiveness, fortitude, cleanliness, freedom from envy and the passion for honor — these transcendental qualities, O son of Bharata, belong to men endowed with divine nature.
-Bhagavad Gita As it Is-16. 03
In short, the reason for Yudhisthira’s calmness was his values and principles upon which he lived his life. And we can also gain our peace of mind by developing these virtues in ourselves.
1. Stop Searching for the Villain: Avoid Fault Finding
It is now our second nature, that the instant things don’t go our way, we start looking out for people responsible for spoiling the dream plot of our life.
Like in the present scenario, some people are blaming China, WHO for mishandling the pandemic. Some people are holding the police responsible for their misery. So some people think that the protesters are the cause of all this chaos. Probably the leftists are incensing this stupidity, or it may be the insensitivity of the right-wingers.
But censuring any of these people/organizations will not give you the peace of mind which you are seeking.
This will only lead you to a negative frame of mind. That’s why stop finding the villain of your story, and start searching for the hero.
Stop finding the villain of your story, and start searching for the hero.
2. Calmness is Slowness: Slow Down
Instead of living life at the edge, try to make it less stimulating. Most of our problems are there because we are involved too much in every 2nd problem of the world. And that too on Twitter and Facebook. You don’t need to solve every issue on Social Media. Not every fight is your fight.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Personal Tip: Don’t use Twitter. 10 minutes of that app used to ruin my day. You certainly do not need to enter every fight on Twitter. You may get momentarily pleasure, but you certainly will not get the mental peace by hashtagging.
3. Fill the Vacuums of Your Life: Have Commitments
Generally, people tend to have 4 vacuums in their life. Introspect which of these lacking within you and fill them.
- The vacuum of Challenge: Not having any single commitment in our life.If you have nothing better to do in your life, then there is no wonder why trivial things take up most of your time and energy. Have some goal or purpose in life.
- The vacuum of Excellence: Accepting mediocrity from ourselves and expecting excellence from others.Being mediocre doesn’t take any effort. In fact, it reflects the truant and fault-finding nature of ours. We want everything to be perfect; our government, our police, our neighbors, even the waiters serving us. We are concerned with everyone’s performance but not of ourselves.Always stay busy improving yourself. You should not have time for these petty things anyway.
“Expect excellence from yourself and accept mediocrity from others”.- Arun Sharma
3. The vacuum of Learning: When you will fill up the first 2 vacuums in your life, then you will realize that sometimes you fail, not because of the lack of any commitments or excellence. Sometimes you fail because you haven’t learned or improved your ability to the level where you need to be.
In each of our lives, this is one of the biggest vacuums. We don’t know in what areas we have to improve ourselves. And how to improve ourselves on a day to day basis. Just having a fake notion of excellence and having dreams in the name of the goals will not be enough. You should know what you have to improve in every area of life. Not just professionally, but also socially, mentally, and emotionally. In each segment, there are a lot of things that we need to learn.
“There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
The learning process automatically makes your mind immune to the outer disturbance.
When you are learning something interesting, you automatically want to stay away from the chaos and seek a peaceful place where you can enjoy exploring the things you like.
4.The vacuum of Action: Procrastinating in taking action towards our goals.
This is one of the biggest vacuums in my life and probably in yours too despite having ambitious goals, all the knowledge, and skills in the world. If I still find myself surfing the comment section of some random YouTube video, the reason is that I am procrastinating to take the necessary steps to achieve those goals.
Not committing to anything at all is a guaranteed failure.
3. Chose Your Wars Carefully: Learn to Restraint
If you take part in every 2nd debate on social media just because you have to, then there is no way that you can remain peaceful. Learn the art of resistance. As I said before, not every fight is your fight. So just mind your own business and keep at it. Even if you are dragged down in various issues, don’t lose your focus.
Remember,
You don’t even need to enter in every war, what to speak of winning them
Even if sometimes you feel you just have to — watch that news, know who said what and to whom, give a fitting reply to some stupid on Facebook. Restraint yourself and focus on your own challenges.
“The path of peace is not a passive journey. It takes incredible strength not to open a can of ‘whoop-ass’, justifiably, when one’s button is pushed.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise
4. Dealing with Sucess: Be Humble
Getting success is one Challenge; dealing with it is another.
Just like failure creates chaos in our minds, success stimulates our minds too. A lot of times, we tend to overexcite ourselves with our little triumphs. And in that excitement, sometimes we knowingly or unknowingly hurt our loved ones.
In fact, in a lot of people’s cases, their mental chaos starts after they get successful. Just after getting a little bit of success, they start to mishandle their relationships, their health, and other areas of life.
Learn to be humble.
Humility is the act of being plain, respectful, even graciously supportive.
On the surface, it may look like that a humble person loses all power. But on the contrary, humility confers a tremendous power to its holder.
It offers its master a break from the desire to impress, to be correct, or to excel. Setbacks and failures have less effect, and a humble individual unquestionably gets the chance to develop, improve, and dismiss society’s labels. A modest life brings about satisfaction, tolerance, forgiveness, and sympathy.
5. Change What You Can, While Endure What You Cannot: Develop Acceptance
You may be the most powerful person on the planet; still, your power will be limited. There are only a limited number of things that you can control irrespective of your power.
I will not force you to like, want, or support whatever it is that you’re tolerating. But fighting against things beyond your control — by opposing and dismissing it — we create unnecessary pain.
Accepting things doesn’t mean that you like your incessant suffering, or that you are supporting injustice that has happened to you or another person.
It simply means allowing it to be there since you can’t change the situation right now. To make space for it. To allow yourself to be yourself, feel what you feel, without making useless disgrace or uneasiness.
Our Values help us to contextualize the present instead of eternalizing it, and that perspective fights off the chaos of the world that assaults us with prejudice, madness, and lack of meaning. So have some values in your life and live by it.
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