suffering is optional.

0:00There's this Buddhist parable. I've been um actually looking a lot more into Buddhism lately, weirdly enough. The Buddha asked one of his students, "If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?" The student nods, "Yes." Then the Buddha asks, "If a person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?" The student nods again. He's like, "Yeah, it is." Then Buddha explains, "In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional."

0:27lot of suffering that we incur like Mark Twain right said earlier like is optional it mostly happens in our own mind to things that never actually occur in reality a useful frame has been like if it has not occurred yet I will not worry about it I used to really obsess about planning out contingencies and I still sometimes have this tendency but if you're like I want to play out this I want to play this out I want to play this out play this out all these different all these different scenarios in a negative frame I'm not saying planning is bad but I'm saying ruminating on negative you know potential futures can be negative by the time something like that happens. Number one, it will not happen in the way that I imagined. It almost never does. Number two, I will have different resources available to me at that time versus what I have today. The path will become immediately obvious and apparent to me when that occurs. And if we're really honest about it, most serious thinking doesn't require that much time. But worrying can take all day and all night.

1:15With all that being said, sometimes you have to give yourself a little bit of grace because in some seasons of life, maintaining is winning. Just not losing ground is the W. you're not having a bad year. You had a few bad days that you're thinking about for the rest of the year. This has been something that I've been really revisiting a lot, which is like we think about our our, you know, our lives like this and say, "This was bad. All of this was bad." But the thing is is that these types of labels only happen in the abstract when zoomed all the way out. And so the flip side is when we're making our judgments, we want to zoom in because when we look at this line, our days were like this. I might have had a bad moment or another bad moment. And so I can just say I had these two bad moments but I had plenty of good times. And so by percentage I had 85% good and I had 15% bad. So all in all not a bad year. And the reason I think this is so important is I will I will start how I ended. I'll end how I started which is the single greatest skill that you can develop for whatever goal that you're trying to achieve in life is the ability to stay in a great mood in the absence of things to be in a great mood about. I hope this helped.