It’s the end of a working day, like any other working day. It started bumpy, had some hiccups on the way, technology failed, internet speed failed, it was a normal morning. Just to shake you to wake you up, back to reality.

But our reality is that all these little things are annoying, irritating and time consuming. We focus on a lost internet connection sometimes for hours! We have something to do online, the online environment doesn’t work, we need it now, we start troubleshooting! And we get to lose track of time! Did you ever notice how caught up in your sideway troubleshooting you can get? After two hours of trying to hack the internet, if necessary, because my appointment was ONLINE and HAD TO BE DONE in a specific time frame, I finally made it work. I felt a genuine joy and sense of relief when I saw that everything was back on track, like that was the supreme victory of my day.

Although is absolutely OK and sometimes quite necessary to stay on track and not give up no matter what, things get weird when we make this exterior reality, made out of troubleshooting and stress, our only reality. We get caught up in all the things that we have to deal with: internet speed, coffee machine troubleshooting, car needing repairs, kids having troubles in school or with understanding life in general, other people in our lives that are also caught up in their things, etc. We forget sometimes we are not the only ones dealing with exterior stress, everyone is! This is the main reason why we should not treat these things too seriously: because everyone has it, everyone has to deal with exterior things, they are universal because they are part of our learning path. We have so many things coming to us for solving, from the outside. And that is not a bad thing, as long as we don’t get caught up in them.

When you dream about your issues, about what mail you should send, what bill to pay, how to dress up tomorrow, or how to answer an e-mail from work, you are caught up! When you stress yourself about what the others will say related to something you’ve done, about how your future will unravel, about yesterday’s and tomorrow’s meals/politics/economics/etc., you are caught up! When you suffer due to other people’s opinion, due to the government decisions or religious beliefs, you are caught up! When you are upset about ten years’ ago history, when you don’t forgive, when you seek revenge and invest energy in it, you are caught up! When the only thing you feel is that you would run, break free, shout, stand up, defend yourself, you are caught up!

You are caught up each time you get absorbed by this earthly existence. You get caught up in a bubble, that grows its walls thicker and thicker the more you take this life seriously. The life doesn’t take you seriously, life says: Let’s play! Life is not caught up in bills and synthetic torments, like judgment, criticism and blame. Life explores and tries, doesn’t consider anything like a failure, but just like another type of result. Success, just like failure, are just the end results of some actions that we have conducted, and they are not separated at the absolute level. By changing our actions, we change the outcome. So why consider it is already set up? And, more than that, why take any result so seriously that you consider it absolute? It is just a result of an experiment that Life did on the playground of your life. It is your attribute to change things so that you have your desired outcome.

Whenever you get too emotional with this life, too worried and too serious about it, you get caught up. Stop! Ask yourself “What is this?”, “Why is this affecting me?”, “Why am I taking this so seriously and personally?”. Just stop, rewind, playback and review what just happened. Find the moment when you got caught up and lost focus, rewind, review and repeat with a different approach.

Getting caught up drains your energy, distracts your attention from what you would really need and like, torments you in a useless way, because that is not the purpose of this life. The purpose is far from being rigid or constrained or serious. The purpose is to explore, understand ourselves, and evolve, mainly through testing, experimenting, trial and error. Well, actually there is no error, it is just a different type of outcome.

So, my advice for today is to stop taking things too seriously. We are not on this Earth forever, the amount of time, although irrelevant, is limited. So why not use it to our own benefit instead of getting tangled in invented values, that don’t care about us? Let’s be flexible, go with the flow and stop taking ourselves so, so, seriously!