Obstacles to enjoying life

I start with the premise that the quality of my life depends on how I feel. So if I want a high-quality life, it is essential for me to feel good.

These are some obstacles that I’ve observed that prevent me to enjoy life:

1. Non-acceptance of the present moment

2. Non-acceptance of past - Regret

3. Negative imagination - Worry/Anxiety

Non-acceptance of the present moment

What do I mean by non-acceptance of the present moment? It is those times when I hate this moment and I just want to escape from this reality. I want it to change badly. I don’t like how it’s going. This immediately puts me in a very constricted mental state, which is not enjoyable. Non-acceptance of the present is not the cause, it is a reaction to something that happened.

Someone sneezes on me ⇾ I don’t accept this moment because I think it’s disgusting ⇾ I’m now in a foul mood. Whatever decision I take from this state will be an instinctual reaction and not something well-thought-out. So this is a state that not only makes me not enjoy life, it also makes me not deal with the situation well.

Once I’m in a state where I’m okay with the present, even if it is going to be that way forever, I’m in a much better state of mind. It feels like an expansion and this spaciousness allows me to think clearly, take things lightly and have fun.

From this state, if I want to (not because I have to - to protect my sanity), I can take action to make the situation better. In this state the following is true - there are no problems to solve, only situations to handle.

As we are on this topic of accepting the present, I’d also like to talk a little about pursuing goals. Sometimes I make goals and realize that I just need to do some grunt work. When it’s just a means to an end, I hate it and I don’t accept it, I just want to fast-forward time and reach the place where I want to be. I would just clench my teeth and do the work that is needed. I never enjoyed a moment of such moments. I just wanted to escape that hell. If you are in a similar situation too, this rant of mine might be useful to alter your perspective. I have found myself in such situations, and when I try to accept the present, it just becomes much more enjoyable. Not accepting the present also drains a lot of energy as any other foul mood. Accepting the present makes life easier and enjoyable.

If I have observed anything in the past 10 years of my life, it is that there are going to be problems everywhere - even in the good places where I don’t expect any problems to be. It is just that there are different kinds of problems in every place. Either I can smile at it and embrace it like a friend and work with it, or I can pick a fight with it. Once I accept the present moment, I can smile at it. When I don’t accept the present, I just want to run away from it. When I can accept every moment, those moments are not wasted. If I think I’ll somehow clench my teeth and study for 4 years, even if I accomplish it, would that be a good way to spend my time? Looking back, I’d feel like that was just 4 years taken away from my life. If I sit with reality and try to accept it and once I accept it and be present with it without running away from it, my feelings about the situation will change, and hence the quality of my life gets better.

Non-acceptance of past - Regret

Non-acceptance of the past is usually because of regret - where you think you could’ve done something different. Now, this is quite easy to accept because we can break the argument in the very first statement that you think you could’ve done something different.

We call the ability to choose between two different actions free will. Most people trivially consider that we have free will. However, if cause-and-effect is true, then the previous moment decides this moment. What we have is a chain of actions. You think you can choose to raise your hand right now, but it’s predetermined whether you will raise it - it is just that many small and big factors contribute to the decision that you are going to make.

So if you consider you couldn’t have acted differently in the past, that means your entire life is a pre-written script. Whether you are going to enjoy your life is already predetermined. This kind of makes death a fitting end where you can just forget about all that happened. In the end, nothing matters. So now you have to sit with this reality that your life is predetermined and accept it. Once you accept this, you cannot have regrets. Your life is just the way it is. There is nothing wrong or right because there is no choice, every action you take can be considered being right because it was supposed to happen.

This doesn’t mean that you stop taking action and just lie down (even that is an action that was supposed to happen if it happens). Well, first if you had no control, that means you cannot give it up now after reading this - because you never had it in the first place. Thoughts come to you, and you pay attention to it, which produces another thought. Soon a chain of thoughts happens, and you feel what you want to do. This has always been the case - you just follow it - whether or not you think you have free will, this is the process of action. You just act upon what you feel is right. You can continue doing what you always do. The point is, you don’t need to feel bad thinking that you could have done something different - with the data that was available to you at that point, you would always take the same decision - only because you have new data available now you want to take a different action.

Negative imagination - Worry/Anxiety

As of now, I know little about this one. I need to observe this one more - maybe a future post.

Wrapping up

So that’s it for this one. Thank you for reading, let me know your thoughts on it as discussing this with other people makes these concepts more clear, and I’d be glad if you can find the faults in my concepts.

I have not covered some concepts in-depth in this article, but have hinted at them. Maybe I’ll cover them in future posts if I write something that I think is worth reading. Much of this post results from conversations I’ve had with some people. Other major sources of inspiration are Soto Zen’s Shikantaza and the phrase “Zazen is good for nothing”, Radical Acceptance: Embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha by Tara Brach, and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

I just want to elaborate on Shikantaza - it’s a practice where you “just sit”. There are a few rules, but one of the major rules is to not have any expectations. Usually, when I meditate, I used to have some expectation - whether to gain some insight or feel better. When I tried zazen, I asked myself whether I’d do Zazen even if I gained nothing from it. I realized I had no interest in doing it if I gained nothing from it. Then I just set up a rule that I don’t care, I will sit for 20 minutes, and I’m going to waste these 20 minutes by doing nothing. In the middle of it, I ask myself if I remove the rule that I have to sit for 20 minutes, will I still sit in Zazen if this is just a waste of time, my answer is always yes, I can sit like this for eternity. But of course, near the 30-40 minute mark, physical pain comes in. But sometimes pain is good as it doesn’t allow me to sleep XD. Anyway, I got the idea to expand that Zazen is good for nothing to life itself and the result is that I realized I didn’t really view life that way. Realizing that life is good for nothing, liberates us from having to do something. This freedom lets us enjoy life. With this perspective, I really couldn’t enjoy using social media anymore because they are filled with advice on what to do to improve your life. Maybe try to not run away from what is.