Sometimes it helps, a bit.

But not much.

And not constantly.

Sometimes it helps to think about all the people who are worse off, who are suffering more, living under really bad circumstances.

Sometimes, but most of the time it doesn’t.

Sometimes it helps to reflect on how insignificant we really are, looking at us and then the planet and the stars and the galaxies and the universe and beyond.

Other times you couldn’t care less.

Sometimes it helps to realize that whatever is difficult and painful and scary today, will be forgotten tomorrow.

That’s a nice one.

Of course, you forget about it too.

Sometimes it helps to do visualizations, seeing your future self in your future body on your future tropical island.

And then you’re back, and it rains, and the sky is grey.

While you’re in your now body.

Sometimes we can use the mind to escape that same mind, with all of its cruel predictions and judgments and punishments and worries.

And most of the time we’re just caught up in it.

The thing is: all this imagining and comparing and mental projecting and visualizing is A LOT of work, and you can’t keep doing it all day long.

Everything mental will come and go and is utterly unreliable.

Trying to use it, deliberately, to become happy, will fail, and fail, and fail again.

Feeling good, chronically and sustainably, is not a matter of taming the mind, having cool stories running in the background on automatic pilot, or approaching wellbeing as a result of hard intellectual work.

The mind is all over the place.

And it’s not even a thing.

Or a really smart machine.

The mind is a bunch of thoughts, pretending to be more than their sum.

Sometimes they make sense, many times they beat the shit out of you.

And you will not, not ever, be able to force them into something reliable, something joyful, something peaceful.

So are we fucked?

Is working hard on your mental state the best we can do, or be?

Nope.

Knowing the mind as an ever-shifting phenomenon, and recognizing that knowing as the only thing that never changes, will change your life.

Being aware, not of something, but AS awareness, is the solution.

It really is.

Not sometimes, but all the time.

(If this sounds like something you want, contact me, because this is what I do. All the time. Mail me now.)

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(Photo by @cas1111, for Unsplash)