At least, I am! I am tired of being forced, coerced and pushed to do things that are deeply out of sync with who I am and what I wish to do. By “Who I am” and “What I wish to do” — I do not mean silly egoistic tantrums but deep value driven choices that make me different from who you are not in a better or worse way but in curiously interesting way!

To lose myself, through one small act of suppression, sacrifice or silence after another, has brought me to a place where not only am I left with no pieces to sacrifice, but also I have run out of energy, intent or ability to put up with another shrewd, out of bounds and insensitive request from you.

But, who comprises of this You? I mean all of you! Yes — The You at home and the You at work and also You at school and how can I forget the You — my relative and friend. Of course, then there is the Government and the Society in their own crude ways choking my choices and suffocating my options to eat, live, sleep and breathe.

Today, I ask you — What do you get out of forcing me? Why do you have to force me all the time? And yes, as usual you have your intelligent answers — because its is for “my own good” or to “help me become more disciplined” or even as magnanimous as for the “greater good“ of all”. But sometimes you have been honest with me and told me the truth “because that is what friends do”, or “because its part of our culture” and this one is interesting “because who else but you to set an example for others to emulate” and the crowd favorite “because it is fun”. Trust me — it is not fun! At least to me.

Have you ever thought — how it impacts us? How your persistent, entitled and righteous need to force affects us? It is as if you are addicted to pursue force as a tool to push, trigger and anger others. You are intoxicated by the power over others and you only want more of it. You not only practice it but influence others to try it out and develop a taste for the blood. You are involved in building a community of hounds who make us feel so helpless, powerless and resigned to fate that all hope is sucked out of our lives.

It may not interest you, but still I will share it. It makes me feel bitter, lonely, anxious and depressed. It makes me feel scared all the time. Scared to share my thoughts, to question or even remotely dream of challenging your thought. You suffocate, choke and suppress us. You suck the life out of our days and blow sleep away from our nights. It is a torture designed to keep us hooked to believe — “we are good for nothing” and seek your elusive acceptance, applause or appreciation as that “drug” that can finally offer us a moment of peace and acceptance within.

What treachery is this? What madness? Can we not stop this? Can we not finally put an end to this, now that we know it all? Why do I allow myself to be forced? Why do I allow my freedom and choice to be taken for granted? Why do I allow my boundaries to vanish and allow your dirty feet to ruin my sacred space? Why can’t I just say NOOOOOOOOO?

I wish it were that simple! I grew up worshiping YOUR acceptance, appreciation and applause and now you have me hooked. You know how much I crave for it and need it for my basic sustenance and you hold it up on leash to force me to dance to your tunes. How so very mean of you? How so very ruthless and insensitive of you?

Ah! This is when, I imbibe the rebellious spirit in me. I want to fight you, I want to change you. I am going to be magnanimous and kind in my gesture to help you see — “What you do” and make you change your ways for good. Since, who in their right mind would do these mean, atrocious things — right? Right?

Oh, in my arrogance I led myself to believe I could change you. How delusional of me? How arrogant, foolish, naive, irrational of me to even dream of changing you! The world is a “Dog’s Tail” and it is futile to even attempt to straighten it. Honestly, having beaten to the ground by my own arrogance, I felt it to be magnanimous to suffer in silence. To Ignore and choose my battles more carefully — now that I can preach “once bitten; twice shy”.

The only thing left is to “Work on myself”. What does that even mean? The only thing that it could mean to me — for now is to work on my “Courage to be disliked” muscles. Pour in my own energies to build acceptance for my own self. Find some courage to like myself. Find some grace to appreciate myself from time to time. May be, May be! A man is at least allowed to dream!

I hope I develop the courage to say NO — an Empowered NO — where my no is not a measure of “YOUR” rejection but more of a YES to “MY” Values, Choices, Priorities. May I have the courage to bear your short term anger and anguish and not fall back like previous times to back out of my own “NO”. May I have the strength and commitment to my own well-being and not be toxically empathetic to your “Self-inflicted” misery to fall back on my own “YES”.

The guilt of saying NO is hard to handle. I have never had an iota of practice through my childhood to manage it wisely. The guilt of saying no to YOUR tantrums is logically fair but is emotionally outrageous to handle. I have been a people — pleaser and how do I accept myself while I say no to you. What dark magic is this?

It is a long long long way, but I am TIRED of being Pushed and Forced. I can’t take it anymore and I don’t even have the energy to wish you well. But, may be someday, I will recover from my injuries to wish you well, but until then I have reserved energies to not let my anger release on you and end up hurting me further.

If you have survived reading thus far, and you are the abuser — I hope you find the courage to change your ways. I hope you find peace in your heart to spread peace. I hope you don’t let your pain to affect you to spread more pain. I have nothing against you but this deep anguish for your trained blindness to our pain and suffering. May you open your eyes to your own suffering and in turn our suffering becomes visible to you.

And, if you are the abused I hope you find solace that you are not alone and I hope you find courage to accept yourself and the courage to say NO. I hope you and I create a community of enough TIRED folks who have the energy to choose themselves over those whose insensitivities have shaped the world. I hope you take up space and decorate it with kindness, love and hope.

May the Tired ones find the time, space, energy and opportunity to heal. May the Tired ones wake up to their pain and have the courage to say “Enough is Enough”. May the Tired ones find their sacred voice and express it for others to connect and heal. May the Tired ones sleep well at night and finally find a way to live during the day!

By practice, I don’t mean religion. What I mean by practice is an intentional act of paying attention while performing a chosen action! Do you have any?

If your answer is a no, this note is for you — in the hope that by the time you finish reading, you have found a reason and purpose to embark on a wholehearted pursuit of _________ practice. The _______ is your choice of action! It could be a lifelong practice of “Writing”, “Meditating” or “Gardening” etc… I hope you get the drift. And it doesn’t matter what you choose — every act of practice can be raised to the level that it becomes sacred.

And, if your answer was a Yes, even then the note is for you too. It is to transform any and every practice [that you currently pursue] and raise it to a level of sacredness that you aspire to.

So, what do we mean by sacred? As I already told you — it has nothing to do with religion. So can we pursue “sacred-ness” without being religious? I think the answer is Yes!

So — what do we mean by transforming our practice into something sacred?

The adjective that I relate deeply to when I think of Sacred is “Pure”. In nature and its diverse creation, purity is by default — it is only when business sense dominates decision-making that it insists that we add impurity to anything we make.

Hence, truth is in reality — “Everything and every moment is sacred”; However we find ways to add impurity and ruin the moment and the act.

What impurity am I talking about here?

The impurity of DISTRACTION. Today, more than ever before we are a distracted species. We have been losing the ability to pay attention and every moment there is a temptation to multi-task.

It could be as simple as listening to music while cooking, or talking on the phone while driving. The intensity varies, but the act involves to some degree the impurity of distraction.

Why? Because it is more efficient!

We have been trying to be efficient since the time the industrial age started. More efficiency means more profit and more profit means a pathway to more material wealth.

However, it is the Business and its Leadership over decades, who were instrumental in drilling and driving the perks and benefits of optimization at work. However, there is no end to efficiency — last year’s 23% is no longer good enough; this year we need 43%, and so on…

And so, we are perennially looking to optimize how we sit, eat, drink, sleep, and work so that we can squeeze that little extra out of our days! This in no way to live and die. This is no way to raise kids and no way to grow old. We are all running a treadmill and optimizing how to run better all the while burning out and never enjoying the weather outside. If this is not absurd — what is?

And, this is how we got our entry pass to the world of hasty, shoddy, unfocused work. We forgot the beauty and purity of focused work. The joy of losing hours and feeling only seconds passed by. This feeling is today on the verge of extinction.

Human beings along the way have picked up more pace than they can handle. From Hunter-Gatherers to today’s Gen AI experts — the only change has been that of the perceived pace of development.

We wanted to just reach the target [by hook or crook] earn the profits promised and get ready to run the next optimized batch. It just gets a little too tiring to say the least after a while. It is beyond my understanding how so few of us even notice this suffering even fewer who initiate conversations and the rarest of rare few who dare to step out and do something meaningful for the soul.

We are still waging wars, killing children, suffocating voices of protest, struggling to eradicate poverty, and dealing with robbery, violence, and all forms of crimes. So, where is the progress? Is sleeping on a better mattress or wearing a device over your head that can show both the reality and the unreal together mean progress?

We are pushed towards an epidemic of shallowness. We have shallow hearts, minds, focus, will, courage, and hope! Please don’t treat this blog as productivity advice. This is my protest against the productivity brigade. I want humans to dump the chase and numbers and grow as the plants and animals grow without any targets on their backs.

Who would you be if you weren’t chasing that mirage of a goal? How would you eat your cereal or drink your coffee? How would you speak to your child if the call was not diverting your attention? How would you drive and cook and write and read and sleep and walk and work?

and, hence I ask of you. What is your sacred practice?

I can’t ask you to ditch your distractions and become a saint or a monk. But, I can ask you to choose a practice and lose yourself in it. Let there be no targets, no goals to achieve, no likes or subscriptions to crack. Just the purity and joy of focus at the moment and losing yourself in the practice for as long as you feel the flow.

Flow. Get into the flow and forget the targets. Flow is divine. Flow is surrender. Flow is the renunciation of results. Flow is the appreciation of the beauty of the process that replaces the anxiety of results. Flow is waking up to forces greater than the ego and tapping on to universe’s juices guiding you to shape that which never existed.

This is Sacred Practice. May you find one and May I retain and build a few as I grow older.

Some of us who lack the wealth of character, essentially end up being miserable with grief; only falling lower and lower still. We blame everyone around us as a way to escape the pain and end up slipping further. It is not that we don’t blame ourselves — we loathe ourselves to perfection. We destroy any sense of decency while trying to measure ourselves.

And then, when we have suffered enough or right in the heart of our suffering — we distract ourselves with food, entertainment and pleasure. The misery was in and of itself hard, but the act of distraction buries the pain and the suffering deep within only to raise its hood when we are least prepared. It is not that we enjoy the distraction too, because behind the scenes the monster is gnawing at us reminding us of our worst fears; but then we choose distraction not because it is soothing, but because it is easy!

What else is easy? It is easy to forget. It is easy to forget the pain and suffering we go through. It all soon becomes a thing of past and we soon run back to our addictions and drama justifying every bit of our action. We then not only enjoy the momentary kick out of the action, but within a moment we open the floodgates of guilt and shame as to how we are unfit to bear the simplest of expectations. We are unfit to commit to anything. We are unfit to grow out of and change our situation. We are unfit to live and breathe.

See, this is a day in the inner life of a loser, an addict and possibly a disconnected loner. I don’t mean loner as in a person who stays alone but rather everyone who in spite of having an ecosystem of friends and family deeply knows and feels lonely. At least I know I am not alone in this regard. I am lonely and I know it and I know you are lonely too but how do you deal with it?

The reason I am sure that we are a lonely generation because we all try to change ourselves in secret. We try and try and try and fail and fail and fail miserably and we don’t want the world to know we failed. Our addictions, our miserable inner lives are just ours. We do not have the courage or vulnerability to connect with others to listen to and understand their struggles, because all this makes us weak [or does it?].

So, here we are — a set of lonely, depressed bunch of individuals trying to change or improve themselves failing miserably and then trying to fake it day after day after day in front of friends, family and colleagues only to pretend ”Everything is fine” — while screaming within with no shred of hope of recovery.

This misery my dear friends if you haven’t experienced then, either you are a saint, or living in denial or so deeply anesthetized that you have lost any sense of connect with reality or I am delusional beyond repair. And, if you have you know the pain is real and the misery is unbearable.

And then, when you have to wake up to this misery day after day after day after week after week after month after month after year after year after decade after decade — then you grow tired of being miserable.

This is who I am — I can track at least two decades of this misery, and I don’t know how long or how fresh is your misery — but glad you are here with me. Now what? Where do we go? What do we do?

I have no clue! but just as I said, I am just Tired of being Miserable!

How well do you suffer? No, honestly ask yourself how well do you suffer!

I have been alive for close to four decades and yet have no clue as to how to suffer — or more accurately “how to suffer-gracefully?”

Our truest, deepest and most sincere suffering happens in silence. Sometimes in front of others and sometimes when walking, sitting, working alone. You may be suffering as you read this and not a single soul around you has a clue.

Sometimes, you are on the brink of explosion. You are about to explode in anger or burst into tears. Whatever your style of explosion — it is just a sign of a poorly managed emotion. We just never had enough practice on how to handle difficult, uncomfortable situations.

Our suffering is not the only suffering. Our reaction to our suffering is our true punishment. Our resistance, disbelief, anger, non-acceptance of reality is harsher punishment than reality itself. Our minds are just too poorly trained to handle reality or rather too finely trained to resist and react every moment of reality.

Such is the extent of resistance that escape is our default response. We are addicted to escaping reality. Moment by Moment. Travelling in a bus, or waiting in the queue for food or waiting for the flight or even in the washrooms — we are in a constant battle with our reality. We don’t like the pause or silence of these moments. We are so stimulated all the time that any moment free from stimulation is a punishment in and of itself.

Congratulations — we have not only inherited ways to suffer from our previous generation and choose not to learn from their mistakes but also we have been creative enough to invent our own unique and original suffering that is not only man-made and artificial but also cheap, readily available, toxic and not easily degradable.

What is even more worrying is no one cares! No one cares about meaningful ways to deal with suffering. We are drowning in painkillers and barely awake and yet we are pulling our kids into the same eternal quicksand of greed, confusion, self-loathing and guilt.

There is help, sound help available to all of us all the time, but we are too weak and meek to even try. We have been in the swamps for so long that we have lost the sense of how it feels beyond the doom and gloom.

Buddha offered us both the red and the blue pill but we are too lazy, too tired, too dazed to even wake up. We are too committed to the rat race that offers us a one way ticket to feeling tired, empty and confused. Nothing interests us anymore and we look forward to nothing.

I hope you reach this or even lower levels of desperation. The lower the levels of desperation, the higher the intent to give up. Give up what? Give up false pretense, fear, weakness, cowardice, inaction, procrastination. The following words will only make sense if you have hit the lows of all lows!

You no longer feel scared of the lows; you no longer seek the situation to change. You have punished yourself enough to even let go of suffering . You can predict the twists and turns that the plot has to offer. You can nearly laugh at the utter lack of creativity and the similar routes that depression takes to make you feel so worthless and helpless.

You want the suffering to end and yet you couldn’t care less. You want the pain to ease and yet have learned how to ride the waves of pain — only to find some dark humor that you are about to release on your fellow sufferers. And when all seems lost, you actually experience freedom for the first time. That you no longer have anything else to loose and you are truly and completely free.

And then you become a super hero! You are immune to the pain and the fear of pain both. You can observe the dance of your mind, the duality of likes and dislikes and yet you are so deeply rooted in the truth of suffering that the duality doesn’t shake you any longer.

Suffering seems more true than the dance of duality. The suffering and the pain are reminders of the illusion that duality presents. When we wake up to our suffering and whole heartedly embrace it without the resistance, the dance of duality becomes clear and we give up the “Seeking”.

To seek is to lay a foundation for duality, to not seek is to see reality as is! and this is our true purpose. To see reality as is and what better way to see it than to see it through our lens of suffering and once we see the reality, the suffering disappears and so does the dance of the mind.

All that you are left with is a pure experience. An experience of ordinary reality stripped of every ounce of hype or tension and just the moment and the content of the moment in its purest, undiluted form.

And how long does it last? A moment or may be a few moments before the mind pounces back and regains the control and we surrender meekly to its magic and return to our false home of fear, insecurity and restlessness. Oh how we forget our own pathway to freedom and surrender meekly to our own imprisonment. This is our real suffering.

The sacred practice is the practice of reminding ourselves of the truth that suffering can be overcome. That suffering at the heart of it remains to be an illusion of the mind. That suffering has no intent or purpose but exists to control our social, public behavior. That suffering is a weak technique employed by the mind to surrender to it’s illusion.

True practice is reminding the pathway to freedom. Freedom from fear of losing anything. Freedom from ego and Freedom from definitions and structures and norms and molds. Freedom is the gift of practice and the purpose of practice is freedom.

May you suffer enough to wake up. May you wake up enough to fall asleep. May you fall asleep enough to remind yourself to wake up again — which essentially becomes the heart of practice and may this practice become the sacred purpose of our lives!

So, How do you spend your days? Do you move from one irritation to another to another all through the day and then tired of all the irritations the day has to offer to settle down in a corner and consume media mindlessly until you feel even worse. If this is not your story you may skip the story and save yourself some pain and irritation.

I get triggered and irritated and I do not know how to get out of it. I stay there for ages until I find a new excuse to be irritated and then shift my base there for a while and this is how I spend my day. Modern life offers no respite — be it the morning news or the Instagram posts anything and everything has the power to trigger me.

It is as if I have distributed remote controls to my life freely to everyone I know and do not know, even to the weather gods I guess so that they can decide how I feel each passing moment. I feel helpless, tired, frustrated and irritated not being able to change anything. Day after day, month after month, year after year — nothing seems to change.

Then, I paid attention! I paid attention to how I get irritated? why I get irritated? and when I get irritated? I realized I am an Expectation machine.

I Expect. I expect something out of every single moment of my life. I want my breakfast to be in a particular way, I want my meetings to happen in a particular way, I want my weather to be in sync with my mood and even the T.V. Series I am watching needs to align with my expectations.

Bodhidharma says “ Do not Seek. To Seek is to Suffer”.

As a child, we are not trained on how to deal with disappointments. We are told not to cry and create a scene and learn to “DEAL WITH IT”.

If you are an adult who has a kid, just pause for a moment and consider what do you do when you see your kid crying or dealing with an irritation? Do you sit with them, listen, understand, counsel, coach or do you turn on the T.V. and play their favourite movie, cartoon, video of their choice and distract them?

We have been brought up in such a way that “Distraction” is the default response to an uncomfortable reality. We are generally comfortable being uncomfortable physically — we carry on with our days with or headaches or stomach upsets or mild flu without much fuss. However, when it comes to mental discomforts and irritations we were never taught to acknowledge, accept and sit with the discomfort and hence we are uncomfortable being uncomfortable.

Each time, you feel irritated — it is a sign of a mental allergy. An allergy you never paid attention to and you are mostly unaware. When you suffer from a physical allergy — you respond differently :

1. You acknowledge and accept the existence of the allergy. [ Eg — Dandruff, Sensitive Teeth, Dust Allergy]
2. Do something/Change something to negate the effects of the allergy [ Eg — You use anti-dandruff shampoo and your life returns to normal]
3. You don’t make a big fuss of the situation and life moves on with minimal agitation.

Now, compare your physical allergy to your mental Allergies. Forget about working on our allergy — we live in denial of the allergy and do nothing to alleviate the pain/suffering and continue to live our lives as victims of fate and circumstances.

Our irritations are pointers to our mental imbalances in life. When and how do we lose our balance because something does not morally, ethically, comfortably aligns to our preferences.

To deal with mental allergies we need to do the hard uncomfortable work as follows:

1. Acknowledging and accepting the presence of an imbalance.
2. Searching for the root value/moral/belief behind the discomfort/imbalance.
3. Studying our preferences — understanding the bias/reason for a particular preference.
4. Aligning the value/belief and preference to an altered new threshold to ensure the cessation of suffering due to the allergy.

There is absolutely no easy way to deal with our mental allergies other than paying attention — compassionate attention to our irritations, understand the beliefs and the rationale behind the choice of belief and finally understanding the need for preferred behaviour/outcome and finding an alternate acceptable preferred outcome to bring back balance into our lives.

We are obsessed with permanence. All through our lives we work hard — very hard to achieve permanence in life.

We seek to achieve a certain degree of permanence in our lifestyle. We seek to achieve permanence in our beauty, youth, job,wealth, name and fame and family.

The only area we seek impermanence is with our problems. We want our problems to be impermanent and temporary and our joys be permanent. Permanence of suffering is a painful and powerful motivator which inspires action in most of us.

Our life projects are aimed at ensuring permanence of name and fame, wealth and wellbeing well beyond our working years and sometimes we want it to last even after our death. It is a tempting project to say the least.

Now, for some to many of us our jobs and ventures achieve a reasonable amount of success in terms of material wealth which fools us to believe that we have gained enough control over our future.

We happily neglect the dependencies we are surrounded with. No one cares about the clean water supply or even shortage of potable water by the time you retire or air decent enough to breathe or a pandemic that no one ever predicted or a market crash that can shake the financial stability of most nations. We live in a delusion of control and we fool ourselves to believe that nothing is going to change that is the variables are going to remain constant.

How can we call a society sane, that just refuses to understand the complexity and interdependence of variable factors that life on earth has to offer and instead live in denial of illusory control and fake sense of permanence?

The greater problem is complete ignorance and misunderstanding of our understanding of suffering. We grow up to be adults to understand Newton’s laws of motion but fail to understand basic human laws of emotion.

Have you ever considered that most of our suffering arises from our toxic desire to manifest permanence where there is none. We suffer when we fail to retain the beauty and strength of youth. We suffer and stretch the boundaries of youth and beauty through medicines, surgeries and app filters.

Our failure to understand and accept the basic nature and truth of impermanence is a great source of suffering, but who cares? Adults never understood impermanence and mindlessly tried to control the outcomes and retain permanence of results of and for their kids. And kids grow up to Delusionally mimic the acts of parents not knowing or understandingthe perils of obsession with permanence.

This systemic resistance to reality and obsession with permanence is an act of hypnotism mastered by corporates who run the world. A world desperate to feel “not enough” can be sold products that sell you dreams of permanence.

But have you ever considered any sign of permanence is actually a sign of decay and stagnation. If you were stuck in a job without promotion or if your kids stayed in the same class for years together. Your body is constantly changing, so is nature around you and any thing in nature that stops changing is only when it perishes to be.

Death is permanent. Life on the other hand is impermanent.

Life’s impermanence allows you to grow. It allows you to adapt, survive and thrive. It allows you to reflect and respond and add value to yourself and those around you. Impermanence is an antidote to boredom of stagnation. Impermanence of suffering is hope for a better future. Impermanence of technology is the birthplace of even better technology.

Impermanence is a gift and Buddha saw it 2500 years back. We suffer because we hardly understand the value of acceptance of reality. A reality that is constantly changing demands a permanent attitude of openness and acceptance over resistance and denial.

May we open our eyes and hearts to the gifts of impermanence and may we inspire others to embrace the same.

There is a popular story in Buddhism — The Tale of Two Arrows. Once a man ventured into a forest and he was struck with an arrow of a Hunter. He was hurt in the arm and he started to bleed. The hunter panicked and ran away. The injured man looked around for help but there was no one to help him. He started worrying — Will I survive?; There has been so much blood loss, will I lose my arm?; How will my family survive after I die? and so on and so forth goes the story.

Well, did you notice the second arrow? No? — Well the first arrow was the real arrow shot by the Hunter and the second arrow was self-inflicted by the injured man through his worries. The pain from the first arrow is inevitable and inescapable but the pain and suffering from the second arrow is hugely conditional.

The thoughts and patterns that arose in his mind are uniquely his worries and concerns. I am not saying, he should have instead thought about his favourite snack or music — that would be a denial of the present reality. However, the worries are not based on facts but on “Could be’s” and “What if’s”, which unfortunately have no grounding in reality.

Imagine he finds his way back to the nearest village or town and gets treated for the injury successfully. He also probably gets a few stitches and is recommended rest for the next month — what happens to all the energy he wasted in the needless overthinking in the moment of crisis?

Sounds familiar? At least to me, it does! I am the person venturing out into forests and getting struck by these arrows from time to time and I fret and frown and worry and get tensed and worry again and then rest for a bit because I got tired of worrying and then worry again and then … You know the drill. But at the end of the day all my fears, worries and concerns turn out to be a false alarm.

Buddha says we cannot get rid of the First arrow, but we can control what we do with our second arrow. Our Second arrow is the response to the pain of the first arrow and in most cases, it is plain “RESISTANCE” to this pain. “ How can this happen to me?”, “What did I do to deserve this?”, “Why me?” so on and so forth. and this is the critical difference between PAIN and SUFFERING.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice — is a popular quote but when applied, it becomes beautifully powerful.

Imagine you are travelling on a bus/train/metro and you have had a rough day at work and you hear an infant crying next to you. Now, this is a simple example of the first arrow — something undesirable and not in your control. However, what you do next is what determines how poorly or how well you suffer! You may get into that toxic loop in your head as to how the day just cannot get worse or you may offer your compassion and kindness to the parent struggling to calm the baby down.

Now, none of the above two options is easy, and both of them have a long-lasting impact, and this is where lies my argument. It is not because that the second option is easy, but that the second option is the right thing to do and you have done a huge favour not inflicting intentional pain upon yourself by allowing yourself to react to the situation. You gathered all the remaining will power or probably loaned into your future will power to truly perform that one act of kindness to ensure that you give yourself a chance to turn the day around.

Had you reacted and burst out on the struggling parent, you may have had the tiniest moment of victory in your head having taught a struggling parent an important lesson, but it would have worsened your mood for a far longer time and chances are once you calm down, you will be overwhelmed by guilt and self — hatred for being such a horrible human and so you get the point.

The difference lies in the level of “Resistance”. Do the resist/fight/deny/delay the reality or use all my energies to accept and acknowledge the reality and then act to the best of my ability as my values and beliefs permit. My values and my beliefs do not get a chance to express themselves as long as I continue to react mindlessly.

For me to truly respond, I need all my energy to pause the toxic resistance of the present moment trying to overpower me to ground. I need some more of that elusive nearly extinct energy to then build acceptance of the reality and then if at all any energy is left after the battle— act with kindness.

These tiny packets of self-control [or lack of ] are where we have the power to stop the second arrow from hitting us. Our days are so full of moments where we react instead of taking a moment to respond is why our life is so full of regrets.

So keep an eye out for the arrows. Know that the first arrow hits us way too often and we waste no time in inflicting pain upon us by striking the second arrow too. May we be explorers who carefully tread the jungles and when hit by the first arrow, carefully open the first aid kit — apply kindness, acceptance and compassion to the wound and move forward in our adventures. That is all we can do.