DON'T PANIC!

 

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape- descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything."

I'm reading an interesting story about a successful author who attends a party given by a billionaire. The story goes that the the billionaire made more money yesterday than the author has made in his entire lifetime but he is fine because he's got something that the billionaire will never have.

He says, "I have the knowledge that I have enough.”

I'm fascinated by the story because it's more profound to me than it seems on the surface. It tells me that the author was ahead of his time. He knew how much was enough and was comfortable and confident with that. The rest of society wants to be the billionaire. They want to gain more and more, hoping that it will eventually make them happy.

But I've come to realize that the authors of the world are happier than the rest of us. The question becomes, how can we become more like them?

Without consideration, our default mode is to pursue things and stuff. It's our default mode because it's so easy. We know exactly how it feels to experience financial stress, but we don't know how it feels for other people because money is a taboo topic that we don't talk about. It's easy for us to look around and see other people acting happy, and so we replicate what they are doing. From the outside looking in, it looks like they are happy because they have more stuff than we do or have better stuff than we do.

Instead of focusing on happiness as our beacon, we tend to focus on the collection of stuff. This is because money is an easy measuring stick. It shouldn't be that way, but that's how it is.
So my question to you is, what can you do today to detach from the pursuit of stuff?