Love is easier

“Let go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love?” -Leo Buscaglia
I have been meaning to write this post for a while now. It’s a lesson I keep on learning each day.
Ps. I struggled to start and finish this post. I have been struggling to write for a while now so I decided to just write.
I joined a new team a while back. We also all met for the first time physically recently and were living together for the while. It was all fun. Exploring a new city. Doing each and every activity the little time allowed us to take part in.
`Love is easier` was my major take away from the whole experience. When dealing with a group its safe to conclude that you will not have the same ideas and thoughts about everything. I remember at some point getting into a misunderstanding with two of my teammates. It was a normal conversation which at some point I took personally. I got very angry. Instead of opening up to them about it, I kept it to myself. On the other hand, they went unscathed; on with their business unaware of my trouble.
It led to an even bigger misunderstanding later on, which finally prompted talking. After everyone gave their side of the story we made up. We dropped the expectations we had of each other and simply decided to take each other as is. I remember after the whole talk feeling empty. All that anger I was clinging to was gone and it felt odd. What do I obsess over now? I also wondered why I had not told them about it from the word go. It’s not like talking about it hurt anyone. The opposite, however, actually did hurt.
We always know what’s best, yet we tend to cling to the petty option. Why do we do so? Why do we take things so personally before actually trying to get the whole truth? If I had focussed on love, I would have been more empathetic with them. But instead of doing that, we put all our energy on negatives. It drains us and is simply a waste of time. What you tolerate, you worry about. So confront it head-on. What’s the worst that can happen? That what you feared all along is what is going to happen? Most of the times it actually takes a positive turn, and when it doesn’t then you still wasted time worrying about something that you did not change.
I use this ted talk every time I focus on worry and fear instead of love. As long as you are investing all your energy on fear and worry, you will never have the time for the things you genuinely love.
I have been training myself recently to take up the behavior of focussing on love when my other option is fear. Because fear has crippled me many times. It has made me feel crazy imposter syndrome. A few days ago I had a really bad week at work. I imagined the worst case scenarios only in my head. Losing my job, having to do a performance improvement plan, struggling to find money after losing my job; I went on and on.
At that moment, I was so overwhelmed by a mistake I made and spent the whole time worried and beating myself up. After I was finally done with my task I remember appreciating the downtime. It led me to see bugs I would not have seen If I had not done the rookie mistake. Who merges to base a PR whose dependencies are yet to be merged to the same base? Clearly, things were bound to break. My take away in all this was to focus on the journey, the lesson the present is teaching me and love and be kind to myself. Be kind to me and my teammates alike.
I have used the same love idea in cases where I felt I had to bow down either to peer pressure, people opinions and even from my managers. I am learning to not just take the easy way to get it over with but speak up my ideas which are equally important to the team. To not just execute tasks but also add your self and humanity to the picture. Sometimes you will need to take a break and then get back on. Whatever works. Just choose the high road. Choose your truth. So which one are you choosing today? Fear or love.
